Produced by David Thomas






 [IMAGE: img000.jpg The Tsar Nicholas II]

 THE ROMANCE
 _of the_
 ROMANOFFS

 BY
 JOSEPH McCABE


 _ILLUSTRATED_

 NEW YORK
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
 1917

 Copyright, 1917,
 By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. Inc.



PREFACE

THE history of Russia has attracted many writers and inspired many
volumes during the last twenty years, yet its most romantic and most
interesting feature has not been fully appreciated.

Thirteen years ago, when the long struggle of the Russian democrats
culminated in a bloody revolution, I had occasion to translate into
English an essay written by a learned professor who belonged to what was
called “the Russophile School.” It was a silken apology for murder. The
Russian soul, the writer said, was oriental, not western. The true line
of separation of east and west was, not the great ridge of mountains
which raised its inert barrier from the Caspian Sea to the frozen ocean,
but the western limit of the land of the Slavs. In their character the
Slavs were an eastern race, fitted only for autocratic rule, indifferent
to those ideas of democracy and progress which stirred to its muddy
depths the life of western Europe. They loved the “Little Father.” They
clung, with all the fervour of their mild and peaceful souls, to their
old-world Church. They had the placid wisdom of the east, the health
that came of living close to mother-earth, the tranquillity of
ignorance. Was not the Tsar justified in protecting his people from the
feverish illusions which agitated western Europe and America?

Thus, in very graceful and impressive language, wrote the “sound”
professors, the clients of the aristocracy, the more learned of the
silk-draped priests. The Russia which they interpreted to us, the Russia
of the boundless horizon, could not read their works. It was almost
wholly illiterate. It could not belie them. Indeed, if one could have
interrogated some earth-bound peasant among those hundred and twenty
millions, he would have heard with dull astonishment that he had _any_
philosophy of life. His cattle lived by instinct: _his_ path was traced by
the priest and the official.

But the American onlooker found one fatal defect in the Russophile
theory. These agents of the autocracy contended that the soul of Russia
rejected western ideas; yet they were spending millions of roubles every
year, they were destroying hundreds of fine-minded men and women every
year, they were packing the large jails of Russia until they reeked with
typhus and other deadly maladies, in an effort to keep those ideas away
from the Russian soul. While Russophile professors were penning their
plausible theories of the Russian character, the autocracy which they
defended was being shaken by as brave and grim a revolution as
any that has upset thrones in modern Europe. Moscow, the shrine of this
supposed beautiful docility, was red with the blood of its children. In
the jails and police-cells of Russia about 200,000 men and women, boys
and girls, quivered under the lash or sank upon fever-beds, and almost
as many more dragged out a living death in the melancholy wastes of
Siberia. They wanted democracy and progress; and their introduction of
those ideas to the peasantry had awakened so ready and fervent a
response that it had been necessary to seal their lips with blood.

We looked back along the history of Russia, and we found that the
struggle was nearly a century old. The ghastly route to Siberia had been
opened eighty years before. Russia had felt the revolutionary wave which
swept over Europe during the thirties of the nineteenth century, and the
Tsar of those days had fought not less savagely than the rulers of
Austria, Spain, and Portugal for his autocracy. Every democratic advance
that has since been won in western Europe has provoked a corresponding
effort to advance in Russia, and that effort has always been truculently
suppressed. Nearly every other country in Europe has had the courage to
educate its people and enable them to study its institutions with open
mind. Russia remains illiterate to the extent of seventy-five per cent,
and its rulers have ever discouraged or restricted education. The
autocracy rested, not upon the affection, but upon the ignorance, of its
people.

When we regard the whole history of that autocracy we begin to
understand the tragedy of Russia. We dimly but surely perceive, in the
dawn of European history, that amongst the families which wandered
through the forests of Europe none were more democratic than, few were
as democratic as, the early Slavs. We find this great family spread over
an area so immense that it is further encouraged to cling to democratic,
even communistic, life, and avoid the making of princes or kings. We
then find the inevitable military chiefs, not born of the Slav people,
intruding and creating princedoms: we find an oriental autocracy
fastening itself, violently and parasitically, upon the helpless nation:
we find the evil example and the tincture of foreign blood continuing
the development until Princes of Moscow become Tsars of all the Russias,
and convert a title dipped in blood into a title to rule by the grace of
God and the affection of the people. And we find that Moscovite dynasty,
from which the Romanoffs issued, playing such pranks before high heaven
as few dynasties have played, until the old Slav spirit awakens at the
call of the world and makes an end of it.

That is the romance of the Romanoffs, of Russia and its rulers, which I
propose to tell. This is not a history of Russia, but the history of its
autocracy as an episode: of its real origin, its long-drawn brutality,
its picturesque corruption, its sordid machinery of government, its
selfish determination to keep Russia from the growing light, its
terrible final struggle and defeat. To a democratic people there can be
no more congenial study than this exposure of the crime and failure of
an autocracy. To any who find romance in such behaviour as kings and
nobles were permitted to flaunt in the eyes of their people in earlier
ages the story of the Romanoffs must be exceptionally attractive.

                                                            J. M.



CONTENTS

I The Primitive Democracy of the Slav

II The Descent to Autocracy

III The Moscovites Become Tsars

IV The Rise of the Romanoffs

V The Early Romanoffs

VI A Romanoff Princess

VII The Great Peter

VIII Catherine the Little

IX Romance Upon Romance

X The Gay and Pious Elizabeth

XI Catherine the Great

XII In the Days of Napoleon

XIII The Fight Against Liberalism

XIV The Tragedy of Alexander II

XV Enter Pobiedonostseff

XVI The Last of the Romanoffs



ILLUSTRATIONS

The Tsar Nicholas II

Vladimir, Grande Duke of Kieff, 980-1015 From an Ancient Banner

Tatars of the Mongol Period

Costume of Boyars in the Seventeenth Century

The Patriarch Philaret, father of Mikhail Romanoff, the first Tsar of
the New Dynasty. Seventeenth Century

Ivan the Terrible, by Antokolsky

View of Destroyed Tower of Nicholas, Arsenal, etc., in the Kremlin, A.D.
1812 From a Contemporary Drawing

Peter the Great

Room of the Tsar Mikhailovitch, Moscow

Paul the First

Catherine II

The Red Square, Church of St. Basil and Redeemer Gate, Moscow

Winter Palace, Petrograd

Cathedral Erected in Petrograd in Memory of Alexander II

Tauride Palace, Petrograd, Meeting Place of the Duma

Session Chamber of the Duma, Tauride Palace, Petrograd

The Tsarina Alexandra



 THE ROMANCE OF THE
 ROMANOFFS

 CHAPTER I
 THE PRIMITIVE DEMOCRACY OF THE SLAV

A LITTLE south of the centre of Europe rises the great curve of the
Carpathian mountains. The sprawling bulk of this long chain, rising in
places until its crown shines with snow and ice, formed a natural
barrier to the spread of Roman civilisation. It enfolded and protected
the plains of Hungary and the green valley of the Danube, and it seemed
to set a limit to every decent ambition. Beyond it men saw a vast and
dreary plain filled with wild peoples whom the Romans and Greeks called
“Scythians.” It was, in effect, in those days, almost the dividing line
of Europe and Asia. One branch of the great European race had gone down
into Greece and, becoming civilised, remained there. Another branch had
found the blue waters and sunny skies in Italy. A third, the vast horde
of the Teutons, was moving heavily and slowly southward in the west.

But about the eastern feet of the Carpathians was a little northern
people, the Slavs, which may one day fill the earth’s chronicle when
Teuton has followed Greek and Roman into the inevitable tomb of
warriors. Where these Slavs came from, and what was their precise
kinship to the other northerners and to the Asiatic peoples, we do not
confidently know. Some tens of thousands of years before the Christian
Era the last spell of the Ice-Age had locked the north of Europe. It
seems that a branch of the human family followed the retreating
ice-sheet and, in the bracing winds which blew off the frozen regions,
shed its weaklings and became the vigorous “northern race.” From this
came the successive waves of Greeks and Romans, Goths and Vandals,
English and Norman and German. From these northern forests seem also to
have come the Slavs, who split at the barrier of the Carpathians into
two great streams: Bohemians and Serbs to the west, and Russians (as
they were later called) to the east.

We have not much information about this people which settled across the
limit of civilisation. To the Romans they were part of the medley of
barbarism which got a rude living out of the bleak north. A few later
Greek writers had some acquaintance with them, and an early Russian
monk, Nestor, gathered their traditions, into a chronicle, and described
them as they were before the development of autocracy obliterated their
native features. From these sources we learn that the Slavs were
singularly democratic for a people at their stage of evolution.

We know to-day the real origin of kingships and princedoms, which was
hidden from our fathers by legends of “divine right.” The right of a man
to rule his fellows came of his possession of a stronger arm or a wiser
head, or a combination of the two: a plausible enough theory until kings
began to insist on leaving the power to their sons, whether or no they
left them the strong arm and the wise head. As a rule the hunt and the
battle gave the strong man his opportunity, and in every other nation at
the level of the Slavs we find chiefs, who dispense justice and direct
warfare, and exact a reward proportionate to their services.

It is a common and surprised observation of the early writers who notice
the Slavs that they had no chiefs. The monk Nestor, who wrote in their
midst at the beginning of the twelfth century, says that they had
“chiefs,” but would not tolerate “tyranny.” The primitive life of the
Slavs had then been modified, as we shall see, but the reports may be
reconciled. The Slavs had no hereditary families of chiefs, no rulers of
tribes who exacted tribute. Nestor gives a very different character to
the various tribes of the Slav family. Being a monk, he is unable to
give any of them a good character in their pagan days, but we may make a
genial allowance for this natural prejudice. Perhaps some of the tribes,
who were in closer touch with the fierce Finns and Scythians, had
chiefs. Warfare is the great king-maker. Clearly the primitive and
normal condition of a Slav community was exceptionally democratic.

The one definite institution of those early days that is known to us is
the village-council; the institution that, being most deeply rooted in
the heart of the Slav, has survived all autocracies by divine right and
is familiar to-day to the whole world as the _Mir_. In ancient Slavdom
the family was not the basis of the state. It was the state, or there
was no state. An enlarged family--for the Slavs were a social and
peaceful folk, and the young, founding a new family, clung to the home
until it grew too small and some must wander afield--with cousins and
children and grand-children, was the unit. The father had patriarchal
power in his little colony, and when he departed the next oldest and
wisest, a brother generally, took up the mild sway. Such families grew
into villages or settlements in a few generations: not too large, for
they lived on the land, yet compact, for there were plenty of human
wolves east of the Carpathians. The Finns and other Asiatic tribes then
filled, or roamed over, the vast area we now call Russia, and their code
did not forbid the plunder of peaceful argriculturists. New colonies
would be founded near the old and form villages. Out of this grew the
_Mir_, the council in which the heads of the various households met
to discuss and decide their common affairs.

No doubt some kind of chairman, some sage elder, would be chosen to
preside, but it is clear from later practice and early comment that the
council only acted upon a unanimous decision. That form of democracy had
inconveniences, and, when Russia begins to have chroniclers, we find
that unanimity was often secured, in a struggle, by pitching the
minority into the river. That, at all events, was the original Slav
custom. In theory even a majority could not tyrannise over a minority,
much less a minority over a majority.

There would be frequent calls for these village-councils, as the land,
on which most of them worked, was held in common. The head of a family
owned only his house and enclosure, and was entitled to the harvest of
his own labour. Then there were the rights of hunting in the forest and
fishing in the rivers, the constant need to send out new colonies into
the eastern wilderness, and especially the need to protect these new
colonies from the wandering Asiatics. Flanked by the Carpathians, up
which they could not spread, the tribes had to push steadily eastward,
and the land was full of Asiatics, for the most part swift and ruthless
horsemen. Co-operative defence was as necessary as co-operative counsel.
The elders of many neighbouring villages met together in a larger
council. There was a rough organisation of villages into a canton or
_Volost_. Again there would probably be a president, and some think that
a temporary chief or leader might be appointed in an emergency. But the
Slavs had no hereditary rulers, no heads of the various tribes.

It also helped to sustain their democratic and communistic life that
they had no priests. When priests later come upon the scene we shall
find them very easily becoming the instruments of autocracy. We shall
find, as is usual, the autocrat enriching the clergy, and the clergy
discovering very impressive legends upon which he may establish his
title to rule. In the pagan days of the Slavs there were no priests. The
religion was the kind of primitive interpretation of nature which we
always find at that level of mental development. The fire of the sun,
the roar of the storm, the mysterious fertility of the earth, and the
awful solemnity of the forest filled the child-like mind with wonder and
dread. These things were felt to have life, a greater life than the puny
and limited life of man; and the Slavs learned to bow down to the mighty
spirits of the sun and the river and the wind and the earth. In
particular they mourned the death of the sun, and celebrated joyously
its annual re-birth and restoration to full glory. But they had no
priests. The heads of the family or the village performed the
invocations and the sacrifices.

We must remember that even in these primitive and patriarchal
arrangements there was the germ of autocracy. The eldest male was an
autocrat. So absolute was his power that it is said that, when he died,
wife and servants and horse had to follow him into the nether world.
There seems here to be some confusion between different tribes, and
there is evidence that, as among the Teutons, woman was generally
respected; although there were ancient marriage-rites which suggest that
at one time brides were stolen, and there was some practice of polygamy.
However that may have been, the father of the household was an autocrat.
We may plead only that he does not seem to have had, as in ancient Rome,
power of life and death over his mate.

Such was the Slav people when we first discover them about the feet of
the Carpathians. We have next to see how they became the Russian people,
and how contact with civilisation and the growth of commerce modified
their primitive communism.

The towering masses of the mountains checked the western expansion of
the growing tribes. The Danube and the outposts of the Roman Empire--the
fathers of the Rumans--shut them from the south. They were, as their
number increased, bound to travel eastward, and their pioneers would
discover that the central part of this mighty waste of eastern Europe
was a particularly fertile region. From the foot of the Carpathians the
land spreads in one of the largest plains of the world until it begins
to rise toward the Ural mountains. Between the forests and bleak deserts
of the north and the arid prairies of the south there are about a
hundred and fifty million acres of “black earth,” as rich
and fertile as any to be found, and south of these a hundred and fifty
million acres of ordinary arable land. At the beginning of the Christian
Era this great area would be for the most part forest and morass,
chequered by vast spaces of grassy plain, furrowed by broad rivers. The
advancing colonies of the Slavs would discover the fertility of the soil
and clear the ground for their corn and flax. The rivers gave them
abundant fish. The forests swarmed with animals which afforded fur and
meat, and the innumerable wild bees gave them stores of honey and wax
for the long winters. Timber for the vapour-bath, which the Slav family
seems already to have held in affection, lay on every side.

We find the Slavs especially spreading over this fertile heart of Russia
about the eighth century of the present era. The land had long been held
by the Finns and other Asiatic tribes when, in the third century, the
Goths from the north fell upon them and drove them eastward. In the next
century began that more formidable invasion from Asia which flung the
Finns westward once more, and cast the Teutons upon the crumbling
barrier of the Roman Empire. In the seventh century a new semi-civilised
race, the Khazars, created an empire in south-eastern Russia, and drove
the Asiatic Finns definitely to the north. It was at the close of these
great movements that the Slavs moved rapidly over the fertile regions,
between the land of the Finns and the southern kingdom of the Khazars,
By the end of the eighth century the various Slav tribes had overrun the
central part of western Russia.

The chief change which this migration caused in the life of the Slavs
was the development of commerce. The great rivers of the land at once
became the highways. Fishers as well as tillers of the soil, the Slavs
would spread along the river-valleys, and the junctions of the rivers
would naturally become the chief stations for what intercourse there was
between the scattered villages. It is probable that in those days, when
four-fifths of Russia was marsh and forest, the rivers were deeper than
they are to-day. In our time they are for the most part shallow
throughout the summer. Only in the spring, when the melting snows and
rains flush the broad channels, can large boats ascend them; and in the
winter their frozen waters make good passage for the sledge. They became
the high-roads of the new commonwealth, as the site of the older cities
indicates when one glances at the map.

The Slavs had at that time probably little or no commerce. Some
exchange, in kind, of fish, fur, honey, or corn might take place, but
the resources were much the same for each village. In a short time after
the settlement, however, a busy commercial system was inaugurated.
Further north than the Finns were the Scandinavians, whose skill in
metal-working was early developed. The Slavs traded with them for swords
and spears and axes.

To the south, beyond the land of the Khazars, was the chief
representative of civilisation in the west, the Byzantine (or
Constantinopolitan) Empire. The northern tribes had now shattered Roman
civilisation. The solid roads, the ample schools, the courts of law and
municipal institutions established by the Romans in southern Europe were
in complete decay, and four-fifths of the city of Rome was a charred and
desolate wilderness. But the city which Constantine had founded on the
Bosphorus, on the site of ancient Byzantium, lay out of the path of most
of the barbarians, and the glory of Constantinople penetrated feebly
into the distant forests of Russia. Its soldiers give us our first
direct knowledge of the Slavs. Its merchants crossed the Black Sea,
ascended the rivers of Russia, and spread before the eager eyes of the
Slavs the silks and damasks and velvets, the shining metal-work and
imitation-jewels, of the great “Tsargrad,” or City of the Emperors. For
these the Slavs could offer choice furs, for an enormous variety of
fur-clad animals roamed their forests, as well as honey for the table
and wax for the myriad tapers of the Byzantine churches.

 [IMAGE: img010.jpg Vladimir, Grande Duke of Kieff, 980-1015
 From an Ancient Banner]

This busy commerce increased the importance of the settlements at the
junction of the rivers. The evenness of the Russian plains, the great
depth of soil or clay or glacial rubbish which uniformly covers the
level strata below, make stone scarce in the greater part of the country
then occupied by the Slavs. The ordinary village was a cluster of rude
huts made of timber, with roofs of straw and mud. The towns also were of
timber, and the accumulation of merchandise in them for traffic or fairs
attracted the Asiatic marauders and increased the need of defence. The
_Véché_, or democratic council of the district, grew in importance.
Stockades of timber were erected. The Slavs, preferring peace as an
agricultural people always does, were compelled to acquire some skill in
the art of war.

Up to this point, the ninth century, the democracy of the Slavs was
unaltered. The villagers were still free and independent men, while the
peasantry over the rest of Europe were slaves or serfs. They regulated
their own affairs in their _Mir_, recognised no central government, and
paid tribute to neither chiefs nor priests. There was plenty of timber
to heat their stoves during the long winter, and in the summer the song
and dance cheered the leisure from their labours. The plot of corn and
the nests of the wild bees fed them; the plot of flax clothed them; and
the winter harvest of furs, taken to the nearest town or fair, gave them
many a tawdry luxury from the great cities of the south. Even in the
towns they had still no money or currency. It was not until long
afterwards that they cut disks of leather to serve the purpose of
coinage. And even in the largest settlements or towns, such as Novgorod
in the north and Kieff in the south, the democratic council, with
unanimous decision, ruled their little affairs.

The defect of a primitive democracy of this nature soon became apparent.
When the less peaceful neighbours who surrounded them on every side made
an attack in force the isolated towns or communities could not defend
themselves. The Khazars of the south overspread the nearest Slav
districts and virtually enslaved them. The Scandinavian pirates of the
Baltic pushed southward from the coast and wrung tribute from them.
Either they must establish a compact military organisation, which their
loose social texture did not easily permit, or they must hire defenders.
They chose the latter course, not knowing, as we do, the ultimate price
of engaging military chiefs.

The Scandinavians or Norsemen were as little pacific as any people of
Europe, and their large frames and mighty weapons made of them
formidable warriors. The Slavs were well acquainted with them. Somehow
they had found the way across Russia to Constantinople, where their
services were richly paid. From the southern shores of the Baltic they
descended the northern rivers, and, crossing short stretches of country
from river to river, they sailed down the broad waterways to the Black
Sea. In the ninth century the Slavs were familiar with the tall,
blue-eyed, blond-haired giants, with heavy spears and formidable axes.
The Greeks of the south, who called them Varangians, clothed them in
rich armour and made of them a special imperial guard. The Slavs called
them _Rus_, or “sea-farers” (if not “pirates”), a name they seem to have
borrowed from the Finns.

This, at least, is what modern scholars make of the ancient legend,
given in Nestor, that the men of Rus were foreign warriors invited by
the Slavs to come and settle and undertake military service. The story
runs that the Slavs of the north, wearied by invasion and pillage,
invited these soldiers to defend them and share their goods. Some
historians suspect that the legend may be invented by the vanity of the
Slavs, who did not care to confess that the northerners had subdued
them, but it is not unlikely that they were invited to defend the Slavs
as they were invited to defend the Emperors of Constantinople. They had
already shown the Slavs that those who did not pay voluntarily might
have to pay involuntarily. As the democratic institutions of the Slavs
survived most strongly in the city where the Norsemen first settled,
Novgorod, it does not seem as if they settled in virtue of conquest. In
western Europe the northerners, wherever they settled, established the
feudal system, which never existed in Russia.

The story handed down in Russia--as the land of the Slavs soon came to
be called--was that three brothers, Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor, answered
the call of the Slavs, and, with their kinsmen and followers, settled on
the Baltic coast. This is assigned to the year 862. From those seats
they cannot have defended, or raised taxes from, much of Russia, but
when Sineus and Truvor died Rurik went to settle in Novgorod. That city,
about a hundred and twenty miles south of Petrograd, was the chief town
in the northern part of the route from north to south. Rurik seems to
have built a stone fort overlooking the timber settlement and been
content with a kind of tribute for his military services. Novgorod
remained until centuries afterwards a jealously democratic community.

The chief Slav town in the south was Kieff, and to this two of the
unruly officers of Rurik’s troop, Askold and Dir, led a company of the
northerners. As is well known, these northern barbarians, once their
barriers were broken down, wandered from end to end of Europe, and even
to Carthage and Alexandria, terrifying the natives everywhere with their
gigantic frames, their immense axes and swords, their guttural grunts,
and their infinite capacity for liquor. The Slavs of Kieff, voluntarily
or involuntarily, received the warriors, and a fresh colony of men of
Rus was planted. They seem to have infected even some of the Slavs with
their piratical spirit, for we read of them leading an expedition down
the river and across the Black Sea against Constantinople itself.

The next step was to unite the towns of Novgorod and Kieff, and bring
the remainder of the Slavs under the vague lordship of the Norsemen.
This was done by Rurik’s brother and successor, Oleg. The Teutonic rule
of hereditary succession came in with the northerners, and the men of
Novgorod seem to have had no further choice. Oleg assumed command, and
he marched his troop against the smaller body of his countrymen in the
south. Askold and Dir had, he said, acted without orders, and had
usurped a lordship which belonged to his brother. Kieff had no more
choice than Novgorod. Oleg found it a finer town than the settlement
among the marshes of the north. He set up there his court of brawling,
drunken warriors, and gradually induced all the tribes of the Slavs to
pay him tribute and furnish soldiers. He was so successful that one year
he embarked his men on two thousand boats, led them against the imperial
city, and forced the Greeks themselves to add to his treasury.

The land of Rus was in those days not the spacious Russia of our time.
It spread little eastward beyond Novgorod and Kieff, and it was bounded
by the Khazars to the south and the Finns and Lithuanians to the north.
But it was now Russia, a group of Slav tribes dominated by a military
caste. It was, however, not yet a nation, certainly not a monarchy.
Tax-gathering and defence were the sole duties of the military chief,
and as the Slavs had demanded the one they were not unprepared for the
other. But the germ of autocracy was now planted in the soil, and the
terrible events of the next few centuries would foster its baleful
development.



 CHAPTER II
 THE DESCENT TO AUTOCRACY

IT is sometimes said that the Slav people lost its democratic
institutions because it was too pacific to defend them. It is true that
an agricultural people would tend to be more pacific than hunting tribes
like the Asiatics who surrounded them, but the native peacefulness of
the Slav has probably been exaggerated. The early Russians seem to have
been as much addicted to hunting and fishing as to tilling the soil, and
the long winter, when all agricultural work was suspended for six
months, would encourage the men to hunt the furry animals which
abounded. Certain it is that both the monk Nestor and the Greek Emperor
Maurice represent the primitive Slav as far from meek, and the chronicle
informs us of constant and even deadly quarrelling.

The truth is that the democracy of the Slavs was too little developed.
It was nearer akin to Anarchism than to Socialism, and the mind of the
race was not as yet sufficiently advanced to grasp the political
exigencies of the new situation. There was no national consciousness,
and there could be no national defence and administration, because there
was no nation; and a body of disconnected communities, scattered over a
wide area, was in those days bound to succumb to marauders.

Russian historians of the official school eagerly point out that the
situation plainly called for a monarchic institution, and that the
monarchs rendered great service in welding the scattered communities
into a nation. That they did unite the people and make the great Russia
of to-day is obvious. It is equally obvious that, with rare exceptions,
they did this in their own interest, and that in all cases they exacted
a reward which made serfs of the independent Slavs, sowed corruption
amongst the rising middle class, and laid upon all an intolerable
burden.

The period of the Norse warrior-chiefs and their descendants lasted
about three centuries, and it fully exposes the fallacy of the monarchic
principle. From being military servants the Norsemen rapidly became, as
is customary, princes and parasites. As long as they discharged their
duty, binding the communities and securing for them the necessary peace
against external foes, this departure from the primitive democracy might
be regarded as merely a regrettable necessity. But the sheep soon found
that the protecting dog was first-cousin of the wolf, The principle of
hereditary succession and the practice of providing for all sons and
relatives soon led to a worse confusion than ever, and the distracted
and weakened country was prepared for a foreign invasion. The long and
sanguinary history of the descendants of Rurik may be briefly sketched
before we see how the autocratic Mongols beat a path for the autocratic
Tsars.

Oleg, who had united the Slav tribes under his ill-defined rule, was
murdered in the year 945. To the north of Kieff a tribe known as the
Drevlians (“tree-folk”) wandered in the forests and paid a reluctant and
uncertain tribute in furs. When Oleg tried to enforce his tax upon
these, they captured him and tied him to two young trees in such fashion
that, when the bent trees were released, Oleg’s body was torn asunder.
Oleg’s widow, Olga, was a handsome Valkyrie of the masterful northern
type, and she sent her armies to scatter the thunders of Thor among the
wild foresters. It is said that she afterwards visited the Greek capital
and was won to the Christian religion. She lives as St. Olga in the
calendar of the Russian Church. Her successor involved the Russians in
long and terrible wars with Constantinople, to enforce his ambitious
claim to Bulgaria, and at his death the fierce feuds and murders of his
three sons plunged the country into a condition of bloody anarchy.

From this sordid strife of the shepherds whom the Slavs had hired to
protect them there emerged in 972, over the corpses of his brothers, the
blond beast St. Vladimir, the founder of Christianity in Russia. To what
extent the lusty and lustful Prince Vladimir was, as the priestly
chronicles maintain, transformed into a saint during his life we need
not stay to consider. He seems to have been converted as superficially
as his prototype, the Emperor Constantine. He was married to a beautiful
nun who had been torn from a convent during one of the raids upon the
Greek Empire, and whom he had taken from his murdered brother; and
thousands of concubines relieved the comparative tedium of her
companionship. The monastic chronicle tells us, in trite language, that
he at length wearied of sin and sought more substantial spiritual aid
than the paganism of his fathers could afford. Judaism, Mohammedanism,
and Christianity now offered their rival assurances to such a promising
penitent, and it is said that Vladimir, with the broad-mindedness of a
modern Japanese, sent his servants to inquire into the merits of the
three religions. The rich ritual of the Greek Christians at
Constantinople prevailed over the more sober practices of the
Mohammedans and the less consoling assurances of the religion of the Old
Testament, and Vladimir became a Christian and a saint.

But the chronicles also recount that Vladimir, whose principality of
Russia was now so important that it could sustain wars with the Greeks,
sought a matrimonial alliance with the royal house of Constantinople,
and the prosy imagination of our time finds here a safer clue to the
development. The Emperors Basil and Constantine replied that the hand of
their sister Anne would be bestowed upon the experienced barbarian if he
would consent to baptism; and Greek priests, who were apt also to be
courtiers, were sent to expound to him the new religion. Vladimir
readily consented to pay so small a price for so great an honour and
advantage. He threw into the river the idols of the Russian
gods--these carven figures had been introduced since the settlement
in Russia--and lent his energy and truculence to the extirpation of
paganism. His people were driven in troops into the rivers, the Greek
priests pronounced over them the sacred formula, and in a very short
time the nature-gods of the old Slavs and Norsemen were turned into
devils and the cross of Christ glittered above gilded domes in the
wooden settlements of the land. Vladimir was so generous to the new
clergy that he died in the odour of sanctity.

But the sins of Vladimir’s pagan manhood lived after him. Seven
sons, by various legitimate mothers, claimed the succession to his
dominions, and there ensued such bloody anarchy as the handsome Teutonic
princes, no matter what gods they worshipped, knew how to create. As
usual the fitter to survive in such a world--the more lusty and
less scrupulous--emerged from the struggle, and Prince Iaroslaf,
one of the heroes of early Russian history, reunited the various regions
under his rule.

Iaroslaf has been compared, not quite ineptly, to Charlemagne. From
Novgorod, which his father had left him, he cut his way to Kieff, and
definitely made the southern city the metropolis of the country. Kieff
was enriched and adorned with a splendour which, in the mind of the
Russians, rivalled that of Constantinople. The southern rivers now bore
thousands of Greek artists and architects, musicians and scholars,
priests and courtiers, to the new capital of barbarism. Four hundred
churches soon shone like gilt mushrooms in the summer sun, and the
grateful clergy discovered that a monarchy which rested on a divine
foundation in Constantinople could hardly have an inferior basis in
Kieff. Iaroslaf, it is true, was not a monarch in title, Russia had no
constitution or political organisation. It was still semi-barbaric in
culture and judicial procedure. The duel, the ordeal, and the payment of
blood-money still flourished, and literacy existed only in the form of
feeble lamps here and there in the vast darkness. It must be remembered
that Constantinople itself was, with all its splendour of gold and
mosaics and jewels and silks, half barbaric in its moral complexion. The
most sordid and brutal crimes disgraced its palace-life on the
shores of the Sea of Marmora, and the most revolting penalties of vice
and crime were publicly inflicted. The discovery by modern apologists
that there was a glow-worm here and there does not relieve the terrible
gloom of the Dark Ages.

In such an age, amidst so scattered and helpless a people, Iaroslaf
needed no kingly title to enable him to act as monarch. To sustain the
new splendour of Kieff and his court--his sister and daughters married
into the royal families of Poland, Norway, France, and Hungary--a larger
tribute from the people was needed, and it was not meekly solicited.
Russian historians of the old school have dilated upon the magnificence
with which Iaroslaf invested his capital and the measure of prestige
which Russia gained in the eyes of the world. They do not point out that
this concentration of light at Kieff and the court darkened the life of
the Russian people. For the first time we now encounter the odious name
for a child of the soil _moujik_. Foreigners who lightly repeat that
name to-day are unaware that it is in origin a term of disdain. It means
“mannikin.” The warriors in glittering armour or shining silks who
gathered about the court were the prince’s “men.” The vast mass of the
people, whose labour ultimately paid for this magnificence, were
“mannikins.”

The burden fell most heavily upon the scattered peasantry. Not only were
the “legitimate” taxes wrung from them, but the military
leaders exacted tribute to support their own splendour and pleasure. The
feudal system, which now prevailed over the remainder of Europe, was not
introduced. The land was still the possession of the people, and
military chiefs remained about the court instead of raising, as they did
where stone abounded, massive provincial castles from which they might
enslave the peasantry and even defy the ruler. But in their excursions
the soldiers behaved as wantonly as feudal barons of the west, and the
people sank under the burden. Slavery still flourished in Christendom,
and many a Slav found his way to the distant market at Constantinople.
Moreover, under the degenerate Greek influence there was introduced the
practice of flogging and torture which the rough chivalry of the
northerners had hitherto avoided.

To say that the unity of faith, the protection against invaders, and the
introduction of art and a small amount of mediocre culture compensate
for these evils is an historical mockery. The death of Iaroslaf at once
revealed the insecurity and selfishness of the regime he had
established. It was followed by two hundred years of civil warfare and
murderous confusion. Eighty-three struggles which seem worthy of the
name of wars devastated Russia during those two centuries, and over the
enfeebled frontiers the waiting tribes repeatedly poured while the
guardians of the Russian people slew each other for their petty
principalities. Sons, legitimate and illegitimate, abounded in that
world of blond warriors, and the successful chief provided for each out
of his dominion. Titles were disputed, or the old title of the longer
sword was boldly advanced. A dozen large principalities were carved out
of the princedom of Iaroslaf, and fragments of these were constantly
detached by heredity and restored by war.

It is not my intention to follow the grisly chronicles over this
prolonged anarchy and select for admiration the heroic butcheries of
some strong-armed soldier. For our purpose it suffices to notice that
the mass of the Russian people were, as a rule, the passive and
suffering spectators of this brutal pandemonium. During the summers
they sowed and gathered their corn and flax, and the long winters
occupied them with the making of clothes and the quest of fur. The Mir
was still the centre of every village. But a tithe of its produce had
now to go to sustain this costly petty monarchy, a tithe to support the
whitened monasteries and gold-domed churches, and a tithe to repair the
damage when the tornado of civil war or some fierce band of Asiatics had
passed over their district. There were, we shall see, provinces of
Russia where the larger intelligence of the townsmen saw that the proper
thing to do was to form a strong republic, armed in its own defence.
These still hated “tyranny” and sustained the old tradition
of the race. But the greater part of the Russian people were not
sufficiently developed to perceive this, or were too scattered to
achieve it, and they sank under the military power they had invited to
serve them.

A few pages borrowed from the story of this dark period of anarchy will
suffice to explain how Russia was prepared for the later schemes of the
Moscovites. Kieff remained “the mother of Russian cities,” and it was
natural that, as its princes founded petty princedoms here and there for
their descendants, the more ambitious of these should invent a title to
the rule of the metropolis itself or found rival cities. One of the
chief of these new principalities was Suzdal, on the Volga and the Oka.
Here, at the extremity of the Russia of the time, a large dominion was
created out of the marshes and forests, and braced by incessant
conflicts with the neighbouring Finns. George Dolgoruki, who, after
failing to get Kieff, had founded this principality, regarded it as in
an especial sense his own creation and possession, and his monarchic
sentiment was strengthened.

But the democratic tradition was not wholly obliterated, and the military
caste itself--the _boyars_, or captains of the troops--formed some check
upon the will of the prince. George’s successor, therefore, Andrew
Bogolyubski, an astute and ambitious man, made a new capital of a small
town or village called Vladimir. Andrew possessed the supposed miraculous
painting of the face of Christ, which had once been the great treasure
of Constantinople, and he professed that this gave him some special
measure of divine guidance. He pitched his camp near the village of
Vladimir, and shortly afterward the people of Suzdal heard with
consternation that he had been divinely directed to convert the little
settlement into his capital. Andrew had the great advantage of being
extremely pious and generous to the clergy, as nearly every great
Russian adventurer has been. The priests warmly supported him, and
Vladimir soon grew into a city.

Kieff still had an immeasurably greater splendour, and was in closer
touch with Constantinople. Andrew raised a large army and led it south
against the metropolis. A three days’ siege was followed by three days
of such pillage that Kieff lost forever its supremacy. Even the churches
and monasteries were looted, and the golden treasures of both palace and
cathedral were carried off to enrich the aspiring city of Vladimir.
Flushed with this and other triumphs Andrew then turned his arms against
the republic of Novgorod, where the old democratic spirit was best
preserved, and, after fierce fighting, compelled it to accept a prince
of his own nomination. He extended his rule in other directions, setting
a conspicuous example of autocracy and ambition to the Princes of Moscow
who would later issue from his blood. But Russia was not yet reduced to
the state of servility which Andrew’s design of supremacy
required. In 1174 his powerful boyars rebelled and assassinated him, and
the oppressed people rose in turn and vented their democratic sentiment
in the pillage and slaughter of the rich.

This is but one outstanding figure amidst the host of brutal soldiers or
scheming princes who fill the chronicle of the time with blood. It is a
wearisome repetition of the same process. A strong or unscrupulous man
unites a large part of Russia under his sway, then a group of less
strong, but not less ambitious, sons and grandsons fight for the spoil
over the helpless bodies of the peasantry. Those who succeed must reward
their boyars and the clergy, and the land of Russia passes more and more
into the hands of large proprietors and is worked by slaves. “If you
want the honey, you must kill the bees,” was the characteristic remark
of one of these descendants of Rurik, as he despatched his victims; and
the little restraint which their new faith imposed upon them may be
gathered from the flippant retort of another princeling, who was accused
of breaking an oath solemnly made over a cross: “It was only a little
cross.”

There were, as I said, northern parts where the democratic evolution
proceeded healthily. Novgorod, a large northern city of a hundred
thousand souls, rising in the centre of a beautiful plain fringed by
forests, had become a republic with wide territory and three hundred
thousand subjects beyond the rude defences of the city. There is a
legend that it had rebelled even against Rurik, the first Scandinavian
adventurer. It accepted, of its own choice, what had come to be called
princes, but it endorsed or rejected them, and curtailed their powers,
with a good deal of civic pride and independence. “Come and rule
us yourself or else we will choose a prince,” the citizens said to
a Grand Prince of Kieff who ordered them to receive his nominee. To
another Grand Prince, who would send his son to govern them, a later
generation of citizens replied: “Send him--if he has a head
to spare.” They had even an independent Church and elected their
archbishop. The old democratic _Véché_, or council of citizens,
was the central institution of the city, and the great bell summoned all
to the market-square whenever some business of importance called for a
decision. The neighbouring republics of Pskoff and Viatka were hardly
less faithful to the democratic tradition. While these territories were
the farthest from Constantinople, they were nearest to Germany and the
Baltic, and they were enriched by the commerce which was then beginning
to civilise the northern cities.

 [IMAGE: img028.jpg Tatars of the Mongol Period]

Even Novgorod, we saw, felt the heavy hand of Andrew of Vladimir, and
the remainder of Russia steadily lost its vitality under the drain of
civil war. Upon this distracted and enfeebled population there now fell
an autocratic ruler of the most arbitrary character. The year 1237 is,
in the chronicles, one of calamities and portents. The fires which so
often devoured the timber settlements of the Slavs were more numerous
and destructive than ever. Drought and famine made haggard faces over
large regions, and from the sky a terrifying eclipse and other portents
seemed to mock their prayers for deliverance. As the dreadful year
passed a new evil broke upon them. Into the southern principalities
poured crowds of fugitives from the east, who told that immense hordes
of ferocious and inhuman horsemen were covering the land and completing
its desolation. Toward the close of the year the first wave of the
Tatars shook the southern frontiers of the Slavs.

Asia had, as well as Europe, its adventurers, and the baleful dream of
conquest had lit the imagination of a Tatar chief, Dchingis Khan, amidst
the dreary wastes of Siberia. Gathering about him the rough tribes of
his race, a swarm of hardy shepherds who knew not what a house, much
less a city, was, he led them against the civilisation of the south. His
men lived in the saddle, and each was a master in the use of the bow,
the sabre, and the lance. Camels and buffaloes bore their (at first)
scanty possessions, and they moved with all the speed of devouring
nomads. The villages of Manchuria, the tame and placid cities of China,
and all the wide spaces of central Asia were successively overrun and
forced to pay tribute. From the civilised Chinese the wonderful and
profoundly ignorant barbarian quickly learned the art of gathering taxes
and enjoying luxury, and he moved further west in a vague design of
conquering the earth.

This strange and terrifying horde, a cloud of fiercely yelling centaurs
with troops of animals which no Russian had ever seen, first fell upon
the southern Russians in 1224. Their method was to press the peasantry
into their service and attempt to disarm the towns with hollow
assurances of friendship, but, in whatever way the town was taken, there
followed a merciless slaughter and a thorough pillage. The Russians,
alarmed by the reports of the outlying tribes, sent out a great army to
meet the Mongols on the steppes, and were crushingly defeated. The
Mongols had, however, retired to Asia, where their dominion was not
solidly established, and it was a vaster army, under a new Khan, that
appeared in the south of Russia in 1237.

From 1237 to 1240 the Khan Batu led his army of 600,000 men, with
appalling destruction, across the various principalities of Russia.
Weakened by their feuds, severed by their selfish rivalries, the
various provinces fell one by one under the feet of the merciless
invaders. Rape, murder, fire, and pillage were the invariable sequels of
success. The Russians appealed to the nations of the nearer west to help
them to dam this Asiatic flood, but the Latin Christians were not minded
to stir themselves for semi-barbarians who did not respect the Pope.
When the Khan passed over the prostrate body of Russia and advanced
still further, in his determination to conquer an earth of which he knew
less than a child in a modern infant-school, the Poles and Hungarians at
length spread their barrier of steel across his path. But the check did
not now profit Russia. Batu retired upon Russia, built a city, Sarai, on
the banks of the Volga (beyond the limits of the principalities), and
began a life of organised parasitism upon the unfortunate people. The
comparative unity brought about by their Norse defenders had prepared
the way for the Khan. The Khan was to prepare the way for the Moscovite.

Again we may ignore the crowded details, the rise and fall and eternal
feuds of petty princes, of the Russian chronicle. What matters is that
the entire country which was then known as Russia was overspread by a
network of tax-gatherers, and the people learned to tremble at the
commands of a distant autocrat. At Sarai the Mongols established a court
of barbaric magnificence, and this in time declared itself independent
of the Tatar Empire in Asia and sought the nourishment of its luxury in
Russia. The western sovereignty came to be known throughout Europe as
the Golden Horde, and the western nations heard with indifference the
cynical extravagance and the occasional brutality with which it treated
schismatic Slavs.

No prince could now don his tattered dignity in Russia without the
august permission of the semi-civilised ruler on the Volga, and a system
was soon evolved which enabled the courtiers and concubines of the Khan
to share the good fortune of their lord. In the constant disputes about
succession claimants to the various Slav principalities made the
perilous journey to Sarai, and the richness of the presents they brought
sufficed to illumine the obscurity of their titles. Occasionally a
prince whose loyalty to the Mongols was suspected was summoned to Sarai,
and not a few who could not pass the humiliating tests left their bones
among the Mohammedan Tatars. To those who bent their backs or tendered
the cup with servile respect the Khan was gracious. They returned with
power to extort the taxes for the Tatars and a large additional sum for
themselves. If their people or rival princes were restive, a troop of
the dreaded Tatar horse was put at their disposal, and the lash and the
sabre cowed every attempt at revolt. The spying and flogging with which
the servants of the Khan protected their master’s interests were
copied by the Slav-Norse princes. The Byzantine civilisation had itself
introduced many devices of autocratic barbarism, for the jails of
Constantinople, especially the dungeons of the superb imperial palace,
witnessed ghastly tortures and mutilations. The cruelty of the Asiatic
completed this machinery of the later Tsars; and the Princes of Moscow
were the readiest of all to be the tax-gatherers of the Khan and the
pupils of his unscrupulous ministers.

The scattered Slavs had, after the three or four years of terror,
returned from the forests to their burned villages and their plundered
towns. The gold and silver had gone from their churches: the inmates of
their nunneries were the playthings of the Asiatic officers: their
democracy was a mockery. Their industry soon healed the torn face of the
country, but lands and lives now belonged to the foreign master.
One-tenth of all their produce must be paid in taxes, and they might at
any time be summoned to do military service. Kieff was in large part a
ruin; Suzdal, Moscow, Riazan, and other cities were despoiled. Even
Novgorod and Pskoff had, after a bloody resistance, to present their
fleece to the shearer.

The miserable condition of the Slavs was further darkened by the
behaviour of their Christian neighbours on the west. The Swedes,
pleading that the men of Novgorod hindered the conversion to the
true faith of the remaining pagans of the north, induced the Pope to
declare a holy crusade, with the customary spiritual and temporal
advantages, against Russia, and a zealous army advanced against
Novgorod. It was shattered, but the Catholic zeal of the west was not
extinguished. The Knights of the Sword, the German order which enforced
baptism as truculently as the early Mohammedans had enforced the Koran,
next appeared on the Russian frontier, and took Pskoff. The Teutonic
adventurers were not less formidable in white mantle and red cross than
they had been in the dress of the pagan Norsemen, and were hardly less
ferocious, but they had to retreat before the stalwart Novgorodians. In
the fourteenth century, however, the united Lithuanians and Poles
crossed into Russia and added to the miseries of the people. Only half a
dozen of the Russian principalities could hold out against the invaders.
The Tatars were now in decay, and the red spears of the Lithuanian
knights were even seen as far south as the Black Sea.

It is to this demoralisation of the Russians rather than to any direct
Tatar influence that we must turn our attention. There was little
mingling of Mongol and Slav blood, beyond the occasional marriage of a
Tatar princess by some sycophantic prince, and the enslavement of
Russian women in the spacious harems of the Asiatics. “Scratch a
Russian and you will find a Tatar” is an untruth. Few races in the
civilised world are purer in blood than the Russian Slavs. Nor did the
Khans modify the Russian culture more than the levying of tribute
demanded. With the clergy they were on friendly terms, knowing their
power over the ignorant peasants, and they suppressed neither the
_Mir_ of the village nor the _Véché_ of the town, as long as
it furnished the collective tribute. On the other hand, they entirely
broke the original spirit of independence; they organised the country
for purposes of extortion, and disorganised it for purposes of
self-defence; they helped to convert the brutal and masterful Norseman
into a calculating and coldly selfish prince; and they encouraged the
subjection of women which the teaching of the Byzantian priests and
monks had begun.



 CHAPTER III
 THE MOSCOVITES BECOME TSARS

THE name Moscow has up to the present entered so little into the
chronicle that we must retrace our steps and briefly consider its
origin. Three successive types of rulers prepared the way for the
Romanoff dynasty: the Norsemen, the Tatars, and the Princes of Moscow,
or the Moscovites. We have now to see how the third class rose upon the
ruins of the Tatar dominion, maintained the evil machinery of subjection
which it had constructed, and brought “all the Russias” under a new
despotism.

In the year 1147 the Prince of Suzdal, George Dolgoruki, found a
village, the site of which is now covered by the opulent Kreml, on the
banks of the Moscowa, and is said to have conceived an affection for it.
His patronage cannot have extended far, since we find that it remains an
obscure village, or small town, for more than a century. It then passed,
with a few other towns, to a son of the heroic Alexander Nevski, who (by
sharp practice--a fit beginning of the fortune of the Moscovites)
enlarged his little principality and bequeathed it to an even less
scrupulous brother.

George Danielovitch (1303-25) laid claim to the principality of Tver and
took very powerful arguments to enforce his claim, in the shape of
handsome presents, to the Mongol court at Sarai. He got his title, a
sister of the Khan for wife, and a Mongol army; but he did not get the
principality, and the Khan, scenting a larger bargain, summoned both
claimants to Sarai. There George ended the argument by having his rival
assassinated. He in turn was assassinated, and a terrible feud subsisted
for half a century between Moscow and Tver. Ivan, the successor of
George, secured another Mongol army to reduce Tver, induced the Khan to
remove his rival to another world, and entered upon a series of
annexations and purchases which made Moscow the centre of a fairly large
dominion, the seat of an archbishop, and a prosperous soil for churches
and monasteries; for the piety of all these lords of Moscow was even
more conspicuous than their craft and insidious truculence.

This malodorous tradition was sustained by the later princes. There was
Simeon the Proud (1341-53) who, at the death of his father Ivan, found
the largest bribe for the Mongols and ousted his competitors. At least
he held in some check the lawlessness which was bleeding Russia, and it
is one of those painful dilemmas of the historian that the
valuable service rendered by the crafty Simeon was entirely neglected by
his pious and gentle brother and successor, Ivan II. But Dmitri
Ivanovitch, the son and successor of Ivan, returned to the sturdy lines
of princely tradition. He defied and defeated the Tatars, and in the
hour of triumph cried to Russia: “Their hour is past.” But the cry was
premature. A rival Russian prince arranged a coalition against Dmitri of
the Catholic Lithuanians, and the Mohammedan Tatars, and the great army
of Dmitri once more cut to pieces its opponents. In the meantime,
however, the famous Tatar general, Timur, had come from Asia and fallen
upon the “usurpers” of the Golden Horde. Dmitri unwisely refused the
friendship which Timur offered him, and before long the fierce Mongols
set flame to the splendid buildings of his capital and littered the
streets with the corpses of its children.

Dmitri recovered and handed down a fair principality to his son Vassili
(1389-1425), who shrewdly preserved his territory by a friendly alliance
with the Tatars on the one hand and a matrimonial alliance with the
Lithuanians on the other. His son, Vassili the Blond, was equally
submissive to the Tatars and friendly with the Lithuanians. Then, in
1462, there came to the throne Ivan III, the first of the two great
makers of imperial Russia.

At the time when Ivan III ascended the throne the principality of Moscow
was a small and feeble territory menaced by the Lithuanian empire to the
west and the Mongol empire to the east. Most of the other Russian
principalities had either won a precarious independence or were subject
to Lithuania. The republics of Novgorod and Pskoff alternately lost and
recovered their freedom, and wavered between the Lithuanian and the
Mongol alliance. Riazan and Tver remained independent and regarded with
jealous eyes the growth of Moscow. This was the Russia of the fifteenth
century, a mere fragment of the country which bears that name to-day.

Nor was this lack of unity the only reproach which we may bring against
the princes who had torn the land in their selfish struggles for
supremacy. Round the whitened monasteries and gilded shrines the feuds
of the princes had gone on without intermission for so many centuries
that the blood ran thin in the veins of Russia. It had neither the
vitality nor the organisation required to meet its external foes, and
every few years some hostile army scattered the customary desolation
over the country. On every side, also, were troops of free lances and
brigands, who constantly swooped upon the miserable peasantry. It is the
claim of the orthodox historians that the Moscovite princes we have now
to describe rescued Russia from this degradation, and we must examine
their methods, their motives, and their attainments.

Ivan III is, in the existing portraits, a lean-faced, sombre-looking
man, with large melancholy eyes and the patriarchal beard which the
Slavs still preserved. These portraits probably accentuate the
ostentatious piety of the man, and give us no idea of the cold ferocity
which could light his heavy features. It is said that women were known
to faint when they met his eye. Certain it is that Ivan united all the
craft and calculating cruelty of the degenerate Greeks with professions
of humility and peacefulness which provoke our disgust. Conspirators
against his terrible rule were burned alive in cages, and the horrible
Byzantine practice of cutting out a prisoner’s eyes was more than once
employed. Even priests, for whom he affected a humble veneration, were
brutally flogged when they departed from the customary subservience of
the clergy and took the part of the people. In war he was a coward. All
the impulsive and savage bravery of the Norseman had in him degenerated
into the mean and shifty hypocrisy of a dishonest huckster.

Ivan ascended the petty throne of Moscow in the year 1462. The city of
Moscow was at that time still little more than a large cluster of
mud-huts, with a few streets of merchants, about the princely palace and
the rich shrines. Ivan looked to his revenues and before long was
confronted with the firm refusal of the citizens of Novgorod to pay the
tribute he demanded. The Grand Prince proceeded with his habitual craft.
Instead of setting out to enforce his demands, he formulated a complaint
that the Russian people of Novgorod were oppressed by a wealthy faction,
and that this faction contemplated an alliance with the heretics of
Poland. We may assume that there was some truth in the charges.
Novgorod, still democratic and independent, still proud of the popular
parliament on its market-place, was full of factions. In such a city a
mutual hostility of rich and poor was inevitable, and Ivan’s
agents seem to have encouraged the aggrieved workers to appeal to him
against what were represented to be the oligarchs. The wealthier and
more powerful faction was led by a woman named Marfa, and may very well
have contemplated an alliance with Poland against the ambitions of
Moscow.

In 1470 Ivan sent against the city a strong Mongol and Moscovite army,
and the ruin which it spread over the lands of Novgorod, as it
approached, induced the citizens to compromise. But the Grand Prince
wanted more than tribute, and his agents continued to foster the
grievances of the popular party and encourage appeals to Moscow. When
the time was ripe Ivan wrought the republican spirit of Novgorod to a
fury by describing himself, in his official documents, as
“sovereign” of that city. The educated citizens saw in this
the doom of their liberty, and, acting in the violent mood of the time,
they put to death the supporters of Moscow. The story runs that the
clergy and boyars of Moscow now gathered round their humane and
reluctant ruler, and demanded that he should make war upon Novgorod.
Certainly Ivan III did not love the hazards of war, especially as it was
still the custom for a Russian prince to lead his troops. But we may
measure his humanity by the sequel.

The conscience of the Grand Prince was reconciled by conceiving the
campaign as a “holy war” against the allies of the Pope, and a
formidable army took the road north. The partial resistance of the
distracted republic was overcome, and Ivan set about the extirpation of
its spirit of independence. The democratic nobles were transplanted to
other soil. The commercial prosperity, which Novgorod had developed in
its relations with the cities of north Germany, was systematically
destroyed. The stores of merchandise and other treasures were
transferred to Moscow. The shadow of the popular council, the _Véché_,
remained--Ivan’s son would complete the work--but a very severe blow had
been struck by the Moscovite at what remained of Slav democracy.

The dependent republic of Pskoff submitted to Moscow, and was permitted
to retain its institutions. The principality of Viatka was next
recovered, from the Tatars, and added to the dominion of Moscow. The
victorious troops, indeed, went on to annex a large part of more
northern Russia, and the first thin slice of Asiatic territory fell
under the rule of the Slav. At a later date the principality of Tver was
drawn into the growing empire. Its prince afforded a specious pretext by
allying himself with the unholy followers of the Roman Pontiff, the
Lithuanians, and religious zeal again edged the swords of the troops.

It will be gathered that the power of the Mongols had now sunk too low
to arrest the progress of Moscow. On an earlier page we have seen how
Timur had come from Asia and chastised the Khans who had dared to set up
an independent sovereignty in Europe. For some reason Timur did not
overrun Russia as his predecessor had done. The clerical traditions of
Russia attribute the escape to one of the miracles which seem to have
been so frequent in that age, but the superior attractions of the new
Ottoman Empire in the south, which was then displacing Greece and taking
over its treasures, may be regarded as a more satisfactory explanation.

Timur had reduced the strength of the Golden Horde, and the dissensions
which followed further enfeebled it. Here was an opportunity after the
heart of Ivan III. Dispossessed Tatar princes fled to his court, and he
sent them back with their animosities inflamed, while he made the
customary presents to the ruling Khan. In 1478 either Ivan or his
advisers felt that the time had come to end the Tatar yoke, and Ivan
nervously found himself at the head of 150,000 men making for the land
of the dreaded Mongol. The issue is one of the most laughable in
history. The two large armies encamped in sight of each other for days
and dared each other to come on. Priests and officers spurred Ivan to
the attack, and his rare fits of confidence, or professions of
confidence, alternated with long periods of what we must regard as
cowardice. Possibly the intensely superstitious prince thought that one
of those miracles of which the clergy spoke so freely would spare him
the hazard of war. A miracle, indeed, appeared, and it is difficult for
the profane historian to penetrate its mysterious working. Both armies
at length, and simultaneously, struck their camps and retreated hastily
to their respective homes! The Tatar had sunk as low as the Moscovite.

 [IMAGE: img044.jpg Costume of Boyars in the Seventeenth Century]

Ivan’s troops, which did not share the timidity of their high commander,
next reduced Bulgaria, and the death of his brothers enabled Ivan to add
still further, and with less title, to his dominions. His brother Andrew
was, in 1493, accused of the usual perfidy and corresponding with the
Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. He was thrown into prison, and there he
conveniently died. Ivan summoned his bishops and monks and, as the tears
trickled down his gaunt face and grey beard, confessed that he had
sinned in sanctioning the cruel treatment of his brother. But he added
Andrew’s territory, and that of two other brothers, to his large
dominion.

In the following year the lover of peace attacked the joint kingdom of
Lithuania and Poland, which had so long afflicted Russia. Ivan had
married his daughter to the Polish king, and had strictly stipulated
that she should have entire freedom to practise the true religion
amongst the adherents of the Pope. In 1494 Ivan found that this
agreement was grossly disregarded, and his beloved daughter ran some
peril of her soul. Later Russian historians have learned from the
daughter’s letters that she had no complaint except against the
interested intrigues of Ivan himself. However, a holy war was
proclaimed, and a good deal of western Russia was wrested from the Poles
and added to the Moscovite dominion.

Such were the methods by which Ivan III doubled the patrimony of his
fathers, and accumulated the wealth and power by which his more famous
grandson would create the great Russia of the Romanoffs. It remains to
see how Ivan organised his dominion, strengthened the autocracy, and
raised the culture and splendour of his capital.

Ivan was by nature autocratic. He did not make counsellors of his
boyars, as had been the custom, and they were compelled to learn the art
of silence in presence of their master. But it was Ivan’s wife who
directed this disposition and created a Court in harmony with it. The
Turks had taken Constantinople and had driven the remnants of half a
dozen rival Greek royal families, and all that remained of Greek
culture, into Italy. Amongst the fugitives was the clever and ambitious
niece of the last emperor, Sophia Palæologus. The Pope, who saw in this
heavy chastisement of the Greek schism a ray of hope of the reunion of
Christendom, fathered the homeless princess and sought for her a useful
marriage. Ivan accepted her and the Papal dowry. They were married early
in his reign (in 1472), and her forceful ambition was behind many of the
schemes of conquest we have reviewed. It was especially she and the
clergy who forced upon the prince his inglorious campaign against the
Tatars.

But we may see her influence especially in the growing splendour and
despotism of the Moscovite court. Bred in the sacred palace by the
Bosphorus, where there still lingered, until the Turk came, some remains
of the most imposing court of the old world, she was made impatient by
the thin coat of gilt which covered the Russian barbarism. Accustomed to
a city of marble palaces, with walls of mosaic or porphyry, with bronze
gates guarded by hundreds of silk-clad servants, and gold and silver
vessels so heavy that they had to be lifted on to the tables by
mechanical devices, she knew how to use the increasing wealth of her
husband’s kingdom. He was now the successor of Constantine and the Roman
Emperors. The two-headed eagle, which had been the blatant emblem of
Greek vanity, passed with the hand of Sophia to Moscow, and was
emblazoned on the banners and plate of the new dynasty. Ivan did not
take the title of “Tsar.” His grandson would complete his work.

Sophia invited to her court Greek scholars and Italian architects and
engineers, and the splendour of Moscow soon became so famous that its
prince corresponded with Popes and Sultans, Kings of Sweden, Denmark,
Hungary, and Austria, and even with the Grand Mogul of India. Italy was
at that time in the flush of the Renaissance, and much of its colour,
and of the less manly art of the Byzantinians, was brought to Moscow.
Whatever one may think of the religious quarrel, it can hardly be
doubted that the civilisation of Russia would have gained by submission
to Rome. The Papacy was then enjoying that period of artistic license
which provoked the Reformation, and probably Russia would have joined
the Reformers. By its severance from Rome it maintained a barrier
against the west, where civilisation was making rapid progress, and
prolonged the inferior culture and conservative influence of the late
Greek empire. The glory of the new Russia was but a coat of paint upon
barbarism.

In the court the oppressive servility and childish pageantry of the
Byzantine palace were encouraged. Golden mechanical lions barked before
a golden throne, as they had done at Constantinople, and filled the
visitor with mingled admiration and disdain. A very numerous guard of
nobles, in high white fur caps and long caftans of white satin, with
heavy silver axes on their shoulders, protected the sacred person of the
monarch, and crowds of courtiers in cloth of gold or bright silk, with
costly necklaces round their necks, vied with each other in flattery of
speech and humility of demeanour. Yet these glittering aristocrats still
carried a spoon in their jewelled girdles, for knives and forks were not
yet substituted for fingers at a Russian feast.

The wives of the boyars were not less splendid. The combined influence
of Mongol princes and Byzantinian monks had, as I said, lowered the
condition of the Slav women. The _terem_, or women’s quarters of the
house, was screened as carefully as the _gynecæum_ had been in ancient
Athens or in Constantinople. The Russians had not indeed introduced that
later Greek security for the behaviour of their women, the eunuch, and
the frailer protection of religion did not prevent disorders; but the
women were, as a rule, carefully guarded at home and abroad, while their
husbands claimed the free use of slaves and courtesans. In public the
wives of the boyars--or, as we may now call them, nobles--presented a
curious spectacle. They painted as liberally as the Greeks had done.
Thick coats of vivid red and white covered their faces, necks, and even
hands; and their eyelashes, and even teeth at times, were dyed. In
obedience to the ascetic teaching of the monks great masses of scarlet
or gold cloth, silk, satin, and velvet, concealed, or preserved for the
admiration of their husbands, the opulent lines of their figures; for
a full habit of body was religiously cultivated.

Round this glittering court, with its Gargantuan banquets and its daily
intoxication, spread the wooden city of Moscow, whose hundred thousand
inhabitants lived, for the most part, in squalor and grossness. Beyond
were the broad provinces of Russia which bore the burden of this
barbaric splendour. The mass of the people had at an earlier date, we
saw, become _moujiks_, or “mannikins.” Others called them “stinkers.”
Now, by one of the most curious freaks of Russian development, they were
known as “the Christians”; as if the quintessence of the Christian
doctrine, as it was expounded by the Russian priests, was obedience to a
lord and master. Their women had the hardest lot; the priests were
content to urge the peasant or artisan, who, like his betters, drank
heavily, not to beat his wife with a staff shod with iron or one of a
dangerous weight. Drink was one of the few luxuries left, for the
priests and monks gave fiery warnings against the song and dance and
games that had formerly lightened the life of the people. Drinking
heavily themselves, they could not, as a rule, rigorously forbid
intoxication.

Such was the Russia created by Ivan and his Greek wife, with the aid of
the Greek-minded clergy, and bequeathed to their second son Vassili.
That prince, zealously educated by his mother, sustained the policy of
enlarging and coercing his dominions. The republic of Pskoff had, we
saw, retained its democratic forms. Vassili held a court at Novgorod,
and thither he summoned the chief men of the neighbouring republic to do
homage. Too weak to rebel, yet aware that the monarch sought to swallow
the last remnant of the primitive democracy, the citizens appealed
eloquently to the sense of honour which the Moscovite might be assumed
to have. It was useless, and the republic was dismantled. Amidst the
tears of the citizens and the laments of the patriotic poets Vassili
removed the great bell to Novgorod and suppressed the _Véché_ or
democratic council. The commercial life of Pskoff was ruined, and three
hundred docile families from Moscow were substituted for threes hundred
who had clung to independence and were now sent into exile.

Riazan was the next victim. The familiar crime of corresponding with
heretics--with the Khan of the Crimea--was charged against its
prince, and the fertile province was added to the Moscow principality.
Vassili recovered territory also from the Tatars and the Lithuanians.
Russia expanded rapidly, and the splendour and autocracy of the court
proportionately increased. There was now only one court for the
innumerable descendants of the earlier princes and boyars, and the
sternness of the competition for rewards made the nobles more and more
sycophantic. Even less than his father did Vassili ask the counsel of
his boyars.

The death of Vassili in 1533 led to a romantic and important interlude.
Vassili’s first wife had been thrust into a convent on the ground that
she could not furnish an heir to the brilliant throne. Whether or no it
is true that she disturbed the solitude of the cloister with the pangs
of motherhood, it seems clear that the chief motive for the divorce was
that Vassili had fallen in love with the very pretty and capable
daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, Helena Glinski. Helena gave birth to
two sons, but the eldest was only three years old at the time of his
father’s death. The mother vigorously grasped the regency and held power
from the furious boyars. Only the Master of Horse, Prince Telepnieff,
was allowed to share her despotism, as he shared her affection. The
nobles split into factions, and they presently found that the easy-going
princess could use the most truculent machinery of despotism. When the
heads of a few of them had fallen, they poisoned Helena and her lover,
and there followed a sordid scramble for power and plunder.

Now of the two children of Helena one was the boy who would live, even
in the history of Russia, as “Ivan the Terrible.” Ingenious historians
have found a milder meaning for this epithet, or discovered that Ivan
underwent some strange degeneration in his later years. But the boy who
was brought up amidst dogs and grooms, who for sheer pleasure cast his
dogs from the walls of his palace and watched them writhe, who stabbed
his favourite jester for the most trifling fault, is the same Ivan who
in later years soaked petitioners in brandy and set fire to them. His
impulses were barbaric, and the unhappy features of his education had
stimulated rather than curbed them. He was eight years old at the time
his mother was murdered, but he was clever, observant, and
self-conscious. He saw the boyars plunder the palace, which was now his,
and fleece the long-suffering country. He noticed that any servant to
whom he became attached was removed or murdered. He read much, and he
grew up rapidly in his solitary world.

And during the Christmas festivities of 1543 Ivan, then thirteen years
old, summoned his boyars before him and let loose upon them an
unexpected storm of reproach. Andrew Chiuski, the most powerful
of them, he handed over at once to his groom-attendants--one wonders how
far they had inspired this precocious display--and the great noble was
soon dispatched. One account runs that by Ivan’s orders he was torn to
pieces by the hounds: others say that the grooms acted without orders.
Other nobles were banished. The short golden age of the boyars was over.
The shadow of a sterner autocracy than ever began to creep over the
court.

Ivan had himself crowned in January, 1547, and he chose the title, which
now first appears, of “Tsar of all the Russias.” Shortly afterwards he
announced that he would marry, and his servants arranged the kind of
matrimonial parade which had been customary at Constantinople when a
prince was to wed. A preliminary survey was made of the daughters of all
the nobles of the kingdom, and fifteen hundred of the most healthy and
beautiful of them were brought to Moscow and crowded into the palace. A
medical examination ensured that they were virtuous enough to wed a
prince who was already expert in every variety of vice, and Ivan made
the round of the trembling maids. He chose the lovely daughter of a
small noble named Roman, a man of either Prussian (Slav--as the old
Prussians were) or Lithuanian extraction. Anastasia Romanovna became the
first Tsarina and the founder of the fortune of the Romanoff family. It
was in the same year that Ivan had some deputies, who came from Pskoff
to set out the grievances of the town, soaked in brandy and set afire.

The boyars were still powerful. In the same year, 1547, a fire destroyed
a great part of Moscow, and the nobles charged it to the account of the
Tsar’s maternal relatives. The homeless people heard with horror that
the Glinskis had stewed human hearts and watered the streets with the
magic brew, and they fell upon the Glinski palaces. Even the young Tsar
wavered for a moment, and the boyars gained ground. Three years later,
however, he summoned a great assembly of all orders of the
people--except “the Christians,” who counted no longer--in the Red
Square in front of the Kreml and impeached the boyars. Reforms were
introduced in the holding of land and the administration of justice, and
an arrangement was made for the presentation of complaints.

Ivan was still young, and the insolence of the boyars continued. In 1553
he was dangerously ill, and he was aware that they plotted to put a
cousin of his upon the throne instead of reserving it for his infant
son. Ivan was, like his grandfather, not a man of much personal courage,
and he continued nervously to tolerate the opposition and corruption of
the nobles. In 1560 he impeached and disgraced their leaders, Sylvester
and Adacheff. His wife Anastasia had died, and he suspected poison. A
state of intolerable friction and danger now set in, and in the middle
of the winter of 1564 all Moscow was alarmed to see a great imperial
cortège leave the palace and retire to the country. Ivan had packed on
waggons his plate and treasures, his furniture and sacred ikons; and his
court and followers went with him on his strange adventure. The
correspondence which followed ended in a curious compromise. Ivan
virtually divided Russia into two parts. The greater part of it was to
be ruled by the boyars, the remainder by himself and his court.

But the young Tsar had reserved the right to punish treason, and on his
return to Moscow he created the machinery by which he could do so. He
formed a special guard of a thousand picked boyars and sons of boyars,
and the dog’s head which he gave them as emblem indicated his
disposition. A reign of terror followed. Thousands of nobles and their
followers were slain with every circumstance of brutality. Such legends
grew out of the red terror that we handle them with some reserve, but we
have a document in which Ivan coldly commends to the prayers of the
Church 3,470 victims--nobles and priests, men, women, and children--of
his new policy. Prince Vladimir (the cousin whom the nobles would have
substituted for his son) and his mother were killed; and there is no
grave reason to doubt the story that they were murdered in Ivan’s
presence, and that he then had their maids stripped, whipped through the
streets, and shot or cut down as they ran. Naked exposure and scourging
were common incidents of the terror.

In 1570 a man reported that Novgorod contemplated going over to Poland.
A letter to that effect would, he said, be found hidden behind a picture
in a certain monastery. Ivan’s servants found the letter where the man
had put it, and the Tsar and his troops moved grimly to Novgorod.
Priests and monks were brutally flogged, so that many of them died, and
then the citizens were brought, in batches of a hundred, before the
Tsar. Some were roasted over slow fires in the great square, where once
the _Véché_ had been held: others were driven in sledges, the children
tied to their mothers, down an incline into the icy river, where
soldiers with pikes saw that none escaped death. The horror lasted five
weeks, and so vaguely terrible was the city’s recollection of it that
the number of victims is variously stated as 500, 3,000, 60,000, and
even 700,000. The Archbishop of the city is said to have been sewn in a
bear-skin and flung to the dogs, but many of the stories of the time--of
Ivan stabbing babes and raping mothers, of his soldiers using white-hot
lances, and so on--may be figments of the horrified imagination.

Ivan, we must remember, was not a burly monster, cruel from his own
indifference to suffering. He was rather a nervous, calculating man,
shrinking behind soldiers chosen for their brutality, coldly following a
policy of terror. When he had sacked the shops and palaces, and ravaged
the whole territory of Novgorod, he turned upon Pskoff. It is recorded
to his credit that he murdered none in that innocent city, but he
relieved it of its wealth and banished many of the leading citizens. He
entered Moscow with all the pomp of a great Roman conqueror, and soon
set up his bloody tribunal in the capital. Hundreds were executed, and
the most barbarous torture was inflicted even upon women.

That was in 1570, and from that time onward Ivan ruled his empire by the
knout and the knife. His end was as inglorious as his reign. Anastasia
had given him two sons, Ivan and Feodor. The three legitimate wives and
various illegitimate partners whom he took after Anastasia’s death do
not seem to have much enlarged his family, and Prince Ivan grew up in
confident expectation of the throne. He was on such good terms with his
father that one tradition speaks of them as exchanging mistresses. In
1581, however, the Tsar was annoyed with his son’s wife, and, with his
customary lack of restraint, he struck her with the iron-shod staff
which he usually carried. She was pregnant, and the blow was fatal. His
son expostulated, and the Tsar again used his staff, or spear, and
inflicted a fatal wound. For a time he professed acute remorse. He shed
floods of tears and declared that he was unworthy of the throne. His
supporters, lay and clerical, did not share his momentary estimate of
himself, and he then, it seems, entered upon a period of worse debauch
than ever. We cannot very confidently pierce the darkness which falls
over the palace after 1581, but it seems to have rivalled in vice the
Golden House of Nero. In 1584 Ivan died.

Russian historians are apt to claim that Ivan was a great man marred by
a cruel disposition and an environment which fostered it. No one will
doubt either the savagery of his disposition or the barbarity and
peculiar pressure of his environment, but his constructive work hardly
entitles him to be called great. His domestic reforms seem to have been
made out of antipathy to the boyars, and we should probably not be far
wrong in attributing his other services to Russia mainly to a selfish
motive. He broke the remaining power of the Finns and Mongols, slew or
sold into slavery whole tribes of them, and made Russian provinces of
their territory. He conquered Astrakhan and its territory, and extended
the rule of Russia in the direction of Persia. He, after a long
struggle, beat the Livonian Knights, and secured respectful peace from
Poland and Sweden.

The greatest part of his policy was his endeavour to bring Russia into
contact with the west. From Livonia to Hungary a line of fanatical
Catholic powers shut out Russia from intercourse with the advancing
civilisation of the west. Ivan could hardly realise the historical law
that isolation means stagnation, but he did see clearly that everything
new and valuable--such as muskets and cannon--came from the
west. Early in his reign, in 1553, some English merchants sailed round
by the Protestant north to Russia, and Ivan became passionately eager
for an alliance with England. There is good ground to believe that his
envoys begged for him the hand of Queen Elizabeth herself! Her
contemptuous refusal, softened by diplomacy, angered him for a time, but
in later life he asked at least the hand of her cousin, Mary Hastings.
He had just taken on his sixth consort, and neither Mary nor Elizabeth
liked the prospect. The English court, which wanted the profit of trade
with Russia, was embarrassed, but as it was in the same year that the
Tsar killed his son and entered upon his last sombre phase the
difficulty did not remain long.

We have now seen how the Moscovites had made the new Russia--the
autocratic and imperial Russia which succeeded the democratic and
smaller country of the Slavs. How much “the genius of the Slav people”
had to do with the creation of that autocracy the reader will now
understand. We have also seen the children of a certain Roman, the
Romanoffs, enter the chronicle, and we have next to see how they mount
the imperial throne and found a lengthy dynasty.



 CHAPTER IV
 THE RISE OF THE ROMANOFFS

THE second son of Ivan the Terrible, who now became the Tsar Feodor, was
a piquant contrast to his father and brother. Not wives and mistresses,
but the ornate services of the Church or long private devotions,
occupied his hours. He was as meek as his father had been truculent, and
the nobles began to raise their heads once more. His uncle, Nikita
Romanoff, brother of the first Tsarina, naturally held the first place
in his confidence and relieved him of the profane task of governing his
dominions.

But the pious Feodor had married, and his wife Irene had a masterful and
ambitious brother, Boris Godunoff. The Godunoffs are said to have
descended from a Tatar chief, who had embraced Christianity and settled
in Moscow. Irene was devoted to her brother, and she used her influence
over the feeble-minded Tsar to promote him. Before long the palace was
split into two factions, and the familiar struggle for power and wealth
set in. Nikita Romanoff was a man of ability, but he had a more astute
rival. Boris Godunoff secured two measures which greatly increased his
support in Moscow and the country.

The first measure won for him the gratitude of the clergy. The Russian
Church was still in effect the Greek Church. Its supreme head was the
Patriarch of Constantinople, who sustained his tattered dignity among
the Mohammedans. Boris induced this man to create a Patriarch of Moscow,
and he thus won the increasing favour of the clergy. His other measure
was one of great and terrible significance for the poor “Christians.”
The expansion of Russia had created large new estates, and the great
land-owners continually attracted peasants away from the smaller
estates. But the small land-owners, who formed the yeomanry or cavalry
of the Empire, were not a body to be despised, either in the interest of
the country or of an aspiring politician. It is said that in 1592 Boris
played for their support by issuing an imperial decree which forbade the
peasants to go from one estate to another. Some Russian historians deny
this. If the document is genuine, they say, it meant only that Boris
legally fixed a practice which had gradually arisen, on account of the
mischief of these peasant-migrations. However that may be, there is no
doubt that Boris Godunoff legally established serfdom in Russia at a
time when it was being abandoned elsewhere. The peasants grumbled and
suffered, but they now had upon their backs an autocracy that treated
their wishes with entire contempt.

As the reign of Feodor (1584-1598) wore on, and no son appeared, Boris
pushed his ambition to greater lengths. The heir to the throne would now
be the young Prince Dmitri, the son of Ivan the Terrible’s seventh wife.
Early in the reign of Feodor the nobles had compelled Dmitri’s ambitious
mother to take her infant son and her relatives to a remote provincial
estate, and from that exile the mother and her kin nervously studied the
failing health of Tsar Feodor and the condition of his wife. The
subjection of women in Russia does not seem to have extinguished their
ambition, and there was at the court itself the usual party, out of
power, which espoused the hope of a possible dynasty. The court seethed
once more with sordid passion.

In 1591 the Dmitri faction at court was shattered by the announcement
that the young prince was dead. Boris ordered an inquiry, and as a
result he announced that, owing to the carelessness of his mother in
supervising him, Dmitri had committed suicide. With becoming zeal the
virtual Regent forced the mother to enter a nunnery and consigned her
relatives to various prisons. Moscow at large, reflecting that the
tragedy removed an important obstacle from Boris’s path to the throne,
preferred to believe that his servants had murdered the prince. That is
the general opinion of historians, but there are some who maintain that
the child was not murdered at all, and that the adventurer who will
presently enter the story was really Dmitri.

For the present, at all events, the way was cleared, and the death of
Feodor in 1598 left the throne vacant. The nobles and people offered
their allegiance to the Tsarina, but Irene, suddenly discovering a
remarkable distrust of her powers and dislike of the world, fled to a
nunnery. Boris had, with equal modesty, retired to the same nunnery, but
his supporters worked for him, and presently the convent was sought by
an impressive procession of the clergy (headed by the obsequious
patriarchs), the boyars, and the people of Moscow, offering the crown to
Boris. He declined an invitation which seemed to him to come from too
small a section, and the general council of the Empire was then
convoked, and it repeated the offer. After a further mockery of
resistance he accepted and became Tsar Boris.

I have said that Boris Godunoff was as able a man to fill the autocracy
as could have been found at that time, and he endeavoured to complete
the plans of Ivan the Terrible. He kept in check Sweden and Poland,
consolidated the gains in Asia, and maintained close and profitable
relations with Queen Elizabeth. He encouraged Russian students to go to
western countries for the completion of their education. But we are
concerned with the rise of the Romanoffs and may summarise other matters.

Three years after the accession of Boris a dreadful famine spread over
the land. It lasted three years, and so great was the destitution that
in later years horrible stories were whispered of parents devouring
their own children. Streams of the suffering country-folk poured into
Moscow, and, as its own provisions were soon exhausted, the streets of
the capital were filled with pale and emaciated ghosts. It is said that
hundreds of thousands died in Moscow alone, and throughout the land the
superstitious people spoke of the sin of Boris Godunoff in murdering the
heir to the throne. The nobles themselves stirred, and Boris put into
operation the usual machinery. The Romanoff family seemed to be an
especial source of danger, and the chief representative of that family,
Feodor Romanoff, was thrust into a monastery and buried under the
monkish title of Philaret. His wife was compelled to enter a nunnery and
assume the name of Marfa.

The scattered feeling of discontent at length gathered round the person
of a singular adventurer. In the summer of 1604 the news spread through
Russia that Dmitri, the third son of Ivan the Terrible, was not dead,
but was approaching Moscow with a Polish army to oust the usurper and
put an end to their miseries. Gregory Otrepieff, who is generally
believed to have been “the false Dmitri,” had been a roving
monk who had turned brigand with a band of Cossacks. From the southern
steppes he had gone to Poland, and there, it was announced, he had,
believing himself to be at the point of death, revealed to a Jesuit
confessor the secret of his birth and shown the priest a jewelled cross
which proved his identity. The Jesuits were still in their melodramatic
phase of secret conspiracy for the Church, and may well have invented,
or embroidered, the story. They pressed Dmitri upon the Catholic king
and nobles of Poland, and in October he crossed the frontier of Russia
with an irregular force. Would the Jesuits add to their many triumphs
the submission of Russia to the Vatican after so many centuries of
resistance?

Otrepieff’s force was defeated, but there was a good deal of treachery,
and presently a large body of the Cossacks came to join the army of
their former companion. At this juncture, in 1605, Boris died, and
priests, soldiers, and people declared that they were convinced of the
genuineness of the adventurer. The late Tsar’s wife and son were
murdered with the usual barbarity. The people of Moscow lustily received
the monk-brigand, when he came for his coronation, and even the widow of
Ivan IV publicly fell upon his neck and identified him. Her relatives
were, of course, promoted to wealth and honour, and even the Romanoffs
returned from the monastic shades to the sunlight of prosperity. Monk
Philaret was made a Metropolitan, or Archbishop.

But the rise to power was not so speedy as the fall from it, and both
give us some measure of the ignorance and barbarism of the times.
Otrepieff was a clever and accomplished man, but he either lacked, or
disdained to use in so credulous a world, the art of tact. He brought a
Polish wife whose suite laughed at the uncouth ways of the Russians. He
himself too openly railed at the backwardness of the country, surrounded
himself with foreigners, and acted with scandalous independence. He was
plainly, as his adventures would indicate, a sceptic, and he snapped his
fingers at the Pope and the Jesuits the moment they had secured the
throne for him; but he was no more respectful to the clergy and
religious forms of Russia. He disdained monks and ikons, asked no
blessing on his table, and refused to follow any of the
court-traditions. And within a month of his entrance into the Kreml the
adventurer lay dead upon the stones of its courtyard. People, amazed at
their own credulity, now exclaimed that he was a sorcerer, and the spell
had to be broken by blowing the ashes of his burned corpse from the
mouth of a cannon.

The succession to the throne had now been interrupted, and a ruler had
to be chosen. Vassili Chuiski, a military noble of distinguished family,
a bald myopic man of little energy, secured the suffrages of Moscow and
mounted the throne. But while the sluggishness of communication enabled
Moscow thus to choose a sovereign for the entire country, it left the
provinces in such a state of confusion and unsettlement that any rebel
could find support there. Another Dmitri arose, and was accepted. People
recollected that the real Dmitri had, like a true Russian, worn a beard,
while Otrepieff had had none. The new claimant had a beard. A regiment
of nobles in one province, an army of disaffected peasants and brigands
in another, raised the standard of the new adventurer and united their
forces within sight of Moscow. There the nobles quarrelled with and
deserted their baser comrades, and the new claimant ended on a gallows.

But the name “Dmitri” was now a phrase under which any kind of rebellion
might find shelter. A number of men who claimed that they were sons or
grandsons of Ivan the Terrible appeared, and the known morals of that
monarch did not make the number implausible. A “third false Dmitri,” a
very poor type of adventurer, was fabricated, and before long the rebels
again set up within sight of Moscow the court of “the real monarch.” The
new impostor went so far as to claim that he was not merely the Prince,
but the first “false Dmitri” also, having escaped assassination, and he
sent tender messages to his “wife” Maryna (who had married
Otrepieff) and her father. In later years they maintained that the
impostor had, after killing their servants, torn them from their home
and brought them to Moscow, but such trickery was common. Maryna’s
father, still thirsting for a crown for his daughter and a share of its
magnificence for himself, brought his daughter to Moscow and bade her
open her arms to her recovered “husband.” “I would die first,” she said,
after seeing the worthless adventurer; but the father persisted, and
soon the “genuine” Tsar and Tsarina held court outside Moscow, while
Chuiski and his friends nervously kept the city.

 [IMAGE: img068.jpg The Patriarch Philaret, Father of Mikhail
 Romanoff, the First Tsar of the New Dynasty. Seventeenth Century]

The situation was complicated by the insidious behaviour of the king of
Poland. King Sigismund continued with a hypocritical pretence of justice
to support the claimant, while he negotiated a surer way of getting the
crown. He claimed the Russian throne for his own son Ladislas, and sent
an army against Moscow. The terrified boyars now compelled the useless
Chuiski to resign and formed a council, including one of the Romanoffs,
Ivan Nikititch, to direct the affairs of the distracted country. This
small group of boyars accepted Ladislas. But it became clear that
Sigismund and his Jesuits put forward Ladislas only as a pretext to
seize the throne, and a terrible agitation seized the people. Their
historic faith was in danger. The shadow of the Pope fell upon their
very walls. The small Polish army had to be conducted into the city
during the night. The people awoke to find Popery in their midst, and
soldiers and the nobles who supported Poland, including the Romanoffs,
had to shelter in the Kreml.

The impostor was at length driven away from Moscow, and in December the
news came that he had been slain by the Tatars. But this removal of one
element of strife now only embittered the people further against the
Poles. King Sigismund was taking Russian towns in the east: the Swedes
were busy in the north. Russia had returned to as grave and costly a
confusion as it had ever witnessed, and the long-suffering peasants
looked up with dull eyes from their plough to hear the latest news of
their masters, or fled before the unrestrained bands of brigands. In
Moscow itself a row between the people and the Polish soldiers led to
days of murder and burning of houses, and the skirmish was turned into
regular warfare by the arrival of an army of Cossacks. The Poles and a
number of Moscow nobles, including the wife and son of Archbishop
Philaret, who had gone to plead with the Polish king and been held
prisoner by him, were closely besieged in the Kreml.

It was a butcher of Nijni-Novgorod who raised at length a national
standard and rallied the best elements of the country. His forceful and
sincere personality bound together his townsmen in a league of effort
and sacrifice, and in the late summer of 1612 a large and solemn army,
headed by the priests and monks and sacred pictures, came within sight
of the golden domes of the metropolis. The townsfolk eagerly joined
them, and the few hundred Poles who remained in the Kreml were summoned
to surrender. Worn with famine, though they had begun to eat the flesh
of their slain comrades, and had made soup of the old parchments in the
Archives, the brave troops at first stubbornly refused to yield without
an order from their king. They surrendered on October 26th, and a
company of living ghosts emerged from the sacred enclosure. Amongst them
was Ivan Nikititch, of the Romanoff family, and Philaret’s wife
Marfa; and with Marfa, his large eyes wondering at the scenes of horror,
was her son Michael who was destined to be the first Romanoff ruler.

A provisional government was formed, and a summons to a great popular
assembly was sent over the country. A number of loosely chosen
representatives--except of the peasants, who no longer counted--came to
Moscow, and the task of choosing a monarch was confronted. The nobles
were generally in favour of Ladislas of Poland, but the bitter
anti-Roman and anti-Polish feeling restrained these. They must have a
Russian monarch, and men naturally asked if they had not still amongst
them some man of royal blood. From Philaret, whose embassy had won him
some prestige, but whose clerical condition debarred him from the
throne, attention was soon drawn to his son.

The mother, Marfa, had left Moscow after issuing from the Kreml, and had
gone to a country estate at Kastroma. There were, however, other
Romanoffs in the assembly, and Philaret himself (who, however, is said
to have urged the election of a boyar) maintained contact with it from
his exile. Most zealous for the boy--for Michael was only seventeen
years old--was a crafty old fox who had married a niece of Philaret, and
might reasonably expect some reward. To the nobles he pointed out that
the youth and feebleness of Michael would leave them a larger power. To
the clergy he observed that to have the father of the Tsar a
Metropolitan of their Church held out a large prospect of power for
them. In short, the nobles were induced to realise that blood was the
thing that mattered, while the clergy and monks were guided by
supernatural visions in which the boy appeared as “God’s chosen one.”
Michael was elected on February 21st. Three weeks later a solemn
procession approached the monastery at Kastroma in which Marfa guarded
her precious son. She wept at the prospect of Michael assuming so
dangerous a dignity--tears are second only to blood in the chronicles of
Moscow--and for several days maintained a most virtuous resistance.
And on May 2nd Marfa and Michael entered the Kreml once more, the chosen
rulers of Russia.

There can be little doubt that the hesitation of the nobles, who really
had no prominent candidate before their eyes, was chiefly overborne in
favour of the Romanoffs by a consideration of the youth of Michael.
Marfa was not one of the strong women who abound in the Russian
chronicles. We shall soon see her return to the convent from which the
national agitation had drawn her. Philaret was a prisoner in the hands
of the Poles, and none could surmise when he would return. We see in the
election little of the national spirit which had cleared Moscow, yet the
country groaned for the creative genius of a statesman and the virility
of a strong soldier. The ravages of war had terribly enfeebled it; its
industrial life was in decay; its hereditary enemies threatened it on
every front.

Michael was a feeble youth whose eyes still looked dully upon the
strange scenes he had witnessed. He passed at once into the hands of his
mother and her relatives, the Saltykoffs, and the court hummed once more
with petty intrigue for money and offices. Marfa appropriated the
hereditary treasure of the Tsarina and, knowing something of the history
of Russia, formed about her a body of spies and supporters. The older
nobles resisted the upstarts, and fierce quarrels for precedence and
appointments occurred even in the presence of the Tsar. At times the
knout was laid upon too offensive shoulders, but several years passed in
these selfish recriminations.

There were, however, urgent affairs to be settled, and by raising the
taxation to one fourth of the individual’s income sufficient money was
gathered, and escaped the fingers of the nobles, to raise an army. So
great had been the disorder of the previous twenty years that Moscow
itself had lost a third of its population, and the impoverished
merchants writhed under the tax. But the Cossacks were threatening. The
romantic Maryna, who will be remembered as the wife of the first and
companion of the second false Dmitri, had given birth to a son, and she
transferred her versatile affection to the Cossack leader, Zarutski, and
relied upon him to secure the crown for her little Ivan. Zarutski swept
triumphantly from town to town, while other brigands emptied villages,
and the Swedes and Poles pursued their accustomed inroads. The new army
scattered the Cossacks, impaled their leader, and hanged the little
Ivan--an infant of three years--in order effectually to settle the brood
of pretenders. Maryna ended her curious career in prison, and southern
Russia was restored to comparative calm.

The councillors of Marfa now turned toward the Swedes and Poles. A
direct struggle with such adversaries was impossible, and Russian envoys
made the round of Europe seeking either money and men to meet them or
mediation to disarm them. At the western courts the Moscovites did not
convey a favourable impression of their country. Their gross manners and
dirty ways affronted even the English and Dutch of the early seventeenth
century, nor were the silver articles of the table or the maids on the
streets quite safe from their ready hands. But England and Holland had,
besides the moderate advantage of hating Rome, a keen desire to trade
with Russia and the East, and they endeavoured to secure peace. Poland
scornfully refused to treat with “the son of a Pope” who had usurped the
throne of their Ladislas. In 1617, however, Gastavus Adolphus, of
Sweden, was bought off by a large indemnity and a few towns, and Russia
was able to oppose a stronger defence to Poland. King Sigismund now
offered a truce, and at a conference it was arranged that he should
renounce the claim to the Russian crown, but keep Smolensk and other
cities.

The peace was followed by an exchange of prisoners, and in the summer of
1619 the Archbishop Philaret hastened to secure the power which awaited
him. It happened that the patriarchal throne of Moscow was vacant, and
Philaret occupied it. That he was a priest _malgré lui_, and enjoyed
the more luxurious and comforting tastes of a profane layman, did not
much matter in that world. Far more religious prelates than Philaret
drank heavily and habitually. The patriarchate was the highest power he
could nominally and legally hold, and he was not wanting either in
energy or ambition. For a patriarch, however, to have a wife about the
court was scarcely seemly, and he “persuaded” Marfa to return to her
convent. He felt also that it was expedient to remove some of her
friends, and in order to do this with a show of justice he reopened a
very curious case that had been settled in his absence.

In the year 1616 Michael had decided to wed a young woman of obscure
family named Maria Ivanovna Khlopoff. Her name was, in accordance with
custom, changed to Anastasia; her espousals were celebrated; the day of
the sacred ceremony which would make her Tsarina was within her
delighted view. Then the luckless Maria fell ill, which no bride of a
Tsar must dare to do. The doctors examined her and pronounced her “unfit
to serve the delight of the Tsar,” and the unhappy maiden and her
relatives were suddenly dispatched to Siberia. Philaret, who knew with
what anxiety the existing favourites at a Russian court regarded the
coming of a crowd of relatives with a Tsar’s bride, and how frequently
the chosen maid met with accidents before the wedding-day, looked into
the affair when he returned. Her confessor admitted that she was
innocent--it now transpired that a certain indiscretion in eating
fruit was the full extent of her fault--and she was recalled from
Siberia and permitted to settle, with a small pension, at
Nijni-Novgorod.

It appears that Philaret had hope of securing a more distinguished
Tsarina. During the next few years he approached the courts of Denmark
and Sweden, but without success. The king of Denmark bluntly remarked
that the air of Moscow was not good for the chosen brides of Tsars. So
Philaret returned to the affair of Maria Khlopoff, and was now convinced
that the jealous Saltykoffs (Marfa’s people) had fabricated the charge.
He fell upon them with great severity, and drove several into exile.
Marfa, however, succeeded in saving the remainder of the family, and
also in preventing the return to court of Maria. To cut the story short,
yet fitly introduce the next generation of palace-squabblers, we may say
that in 1624 Michael married Princess Maria Dolgoruki; and, as she died
soon afterwards, he married a woman of undistinguished family, Eudoxia
Strecknieff. The new Tsarina provided a son, Alexis, and the precious
dynasty of the Romanoffs was saved from a premature extinction.

Philaret had ability, and we need not quarrel with the way in which he
took the power from the hands of his feeble and incompetent son. That he
was a Wolsey or a Richelieu, as some historians conceive him, is far too
flattering an exaggeration. The Cossacks, the Poles, and the Swedes were
disarmed while he was still absent, and when the Poles renewed the war
in 1632 Philaret’s army was badly beaten, and he could think of
nothing better than to have its generals executed. He had friendly
relations with France and England, because both wanted to enter, through
Russia, into a profitable commerce with Persia; which was refused. The
Turks, of course, barred the Mediterranean route to the east. The Sultan
offered Philaret an alliance against the Poles, but he was at that time
unprepared for a big war. On the whole it was a balance of interests
rather than statesmanship which gave Russia some years of peace.

Internally Philaret did more active service. The question had already
arisen whether Russia should be Europeanised. The colony of foreign
merchants which now grew just outside the walls of Moscow exhibited a
higher culture. The western armies were constantly superior to the
Russian in equipment. The envoys to France, England, and Holland spoke
of refinements which made the luxury of Moscow seem tawdry. On the other
hand were the inevitable croakers who protested that Russian trade,
Russian religion, or even the Russian State, would not survive an
invasion of western ideas. Philaret boldly adopted the progressive view
and summoned foreign teachers to Moscow. Astronomers brought their
marvellous instruments to astonish or scare the populace; mathematicians
and literary men opened schools in the metropolis. Against one western
discovery, tobacco, the Russians remained obdurate; while the man who
was caught surreptitiously taking snuff, as the westerners did, had his
nose cut off.

The religious controversy also contributed to the sharpening of the wits
of the nation. The Jesuits still lingered heroically on the fringe of
the Empire and sought to bring it under the rule of the Papacy. Even a
new pretender was tried--a son of Maryna who had escaped murder, they
said--but the man, a commonplace peasant, was not chosen with their
usual skill, and little harm was done. In the Russian provinces which
were subject to Poland, however, they worked with such effect that the
Church was rent by a great schism. Some of the Russian prelates were for
union with Rome. The struggle had an echo in Russia, and some education
for controversial purposes was inaugurated. We must, however, not
exaggerate the effect on the Russian mind of this controversy. It is
estimated by Russian historians that at that time not one person in a
thousand, at the most, could read, and even in the city-circles in which
the points at issue were debated the clash of ideas must have been of
the crudest conceivable nature.

Philaret, who sincerely endeavoured to introduce some western culture
into this dense jungle of ignorance and superstition, died in 1633.
Michael continued for twelve years to sustain feebly the plans of his
father, and the period may be described as one of slow recovery. An
amusing episode of Michael’s last year will give some idea of the
condition even of the court.

In 1641 Prince Valdemar of Denmark came to Russia on behalf of his
father. The court decided that it would like him to wed the Princess
Irene, and, when Valdemar was deaf to hints and returned to Copenhagen,
a deputation was sent to consult with his father. King Christian
favoured the proposal, but Valdemar had seen Moscow and was not
attracted. When one of the envoys fervently pledged his head as a
guarantee that all would be well, the young prince asked: “What should I
do with your head?” At the beginning of 1645, however, he submitted so
far to the pressure as to go to Moscow, and a quaint struggle followed.
For five months the prince fought against the marriage. In vain were the
person and virtues of Irene impressed upon him. He was assured that she
never got drunk, as other Russian ladies did, and her personal
attractions, which seem to have been feeble, were eloquently
exaggerated. Valdemar found the pretext that his evangelical faith was
in grave danger if he joined the Russian court, and he proposed to
return to Denmark. He was virtually a prisoner in the Kreml, and on one
occasion he created a scandal by drawing the sword and threatening to
cut his way out. In July Michael died, and his successor allowed the
Danish prince to return home.



 CHAPTER V
 THE EARLY ROMANOFFS

THE feeble Michael had, we saw, provided an heir to the golden throne,
and, owing to the comparative length of his reign, his son Alexis had
reached a mature age when his turn came to rule. The portraits of all
the Tsars have been so thickly overlaid with rhetorical paint that we
have some difficulty in discerning their true historical features.
Alexis seems to have been a ruler of generally excellent intentions and
very moderate ability. He was at the time of his accession a youth of
sixteen: a tall, handsome youth, physically stronger than his father and
fond of hunting, but nervous and irritable. It needed no keenness of
vision to see that Russia was in a deplorable condition. The nobles and
officials were as corrupt as ever; the fiscal system and administration
of justice were atrocious; the merchants struggled feebly against
foreign competition, and the serfs were crushed to the ground under
their burdens. Alexis assuredly resented this corruption and
incompetence, and sustained the small efforts of his father and
grandfather to improve the country.

The Tsar’s mother died soon after his accession, and the customary place
of chief favourite and virtual ruler fell to Boris Ivanovitch Morozoff,
who had for the preceding three years had charge of the prince’s
education. Morozoff had the ambition and moral indelicacy which were
common to his time and class, and he and his friends grew rich. But
there was one cloud on the horizon of their prosperity. Alexis must soon
marry, and behind the bride, whoever she might be, Morozoff and his
friends saw the usual crowd of greedy relatives hastening to Moscow and
clamouring for wealth and power. Morozoff cleverly conceived his plans
to avoid this danger.

In the early part of the year 1647 the thrilling message went through
the Empire that the young Tsar would choose a bride, and every noble or
commoner who had, or thought that he had, a youthful daughter with the
required degree of health, beauty, and virtue, made application to the
officials. A swarm of officers spread over the Empire and conducted the
preliminary examination. Then some two hundred picked beauties, rotund
and blushing, were drafted to the imperial palace and packed into what
might seem to be a large harem. At night, when the palpitating maids had
retired to bed, the Tsar and his medical attendant went from bed to bed
and inspected the very wakeful beauties. The golden rose fell on this
occasion to Euphemia Voievolojski, the daughter of a noble who was in
poor circumstances. But the unexpected honour was too much for the
obscure provincial girl. She fainted from joy and agitation, and the
party of Morozoff, who were apprehensive of the coming of rivals, put a
grave interpretation upon her weakness. She must be epileptic, and
entirely unfit to rear a brood of little Romanoffs; and poor Euphemia
and her relatives, who for a moment had had golden visions, were
dispatched to Siberia.

Morozoff had another plan for marrying the Tsar. An obscure man of the
boyar class named Miloslavski had two pretty daughters, and Morozoff
designed to wed one and make a Tsarina of the other. Whether he was
already in love with Anna Miloslavski, or whether he merely felt it
prudent to annex her and her relatives when the Tsar married her sister,
is not apparent. It is enough that Alexis married Maria, and ten days
afterwards Morozoff wedded her sister Anna, and neatly secured the
linking of the ambition of Miloslavski with his own. Legend afterwards
said that the two girls had, not long before, sold mushrooms in the
public market at Moscow. Certainly their father had been poor and
insignificant, and just as certainly he and his relatives at once began
to heap up wealth by every corrupt device known in the tradition of the
Moscovite court. Other Miloslavskis came to court, and a fresh brood of
parasites fastened upon the veins of the country.

The Tsar was a good-humoured, indulgent man. Good-humour, which really
meant an indolent and short-sighted habit of extracting whatever
pleasure the actual circumstances afforded, was at that time, and
remained until the present crisis, the chief characteristic of Russia.
The democratic peasant of the primitive tribe had relieved his labours
with the song and the dance. The serf now had little joy in life, but,
while the song and dance were banned, a new and potent element of gaiety
had been introduced: brandy. Everybody drank, and nearly everybody drank
copiously. Alexis himself was sober in habit, though even he liked to
intoxicate others at his table, but drunkenness was the daily rule. The
Patriarch of Moscow got drunk, the priests and monks got drunk, and the
people--as far as their means went--followed the example of their lords
and pastors. Vast quantities of wine, hydromel, and especially brandy
were consumed, and pepper was mixed with the brandy to improve its
sting. Babies drank neat brandy. Wives lay drunk, side by side with
their husbands, in a state of alarming _deshabille_, in the sleighs and
coaches which ran noisily along the street. The few who resisted were,
as a jest, compelled to drink. Even nuns and delicate young girls had
more than once the option of emptying a flagon of brandy or enduring a
whipping. Women at times prostituted themselves, and men sold their
clothes, in order to get the precious _vodka_.

Russian life generally did not rise much above this level. The people
were, as I said, so illiterate and ignorant that scarcely one in a
thousand could read. Superstition throve in proportion to the ignorance,
and vice and brutality were not far behind. Women were atrociously
treated. The women of the richer class contrived, as we shall see, to
creep through the restrictions imposed upon them and share the license
of their lords, but in the great mass of the people the mother had a
generally deplorable position. Wives were often whipped or beaten
until the blood flowed, and many a brutal husband rubbed salt into the
wounds. At times a frantic wife killed her husband, and in such cases
the law exacted an awful penalty. In other cases bloodshed was too
common an event to be severely punished. Moscow was distinguished among
European cities for violence and bloodshed.

Vice and coarseness were still common enough all over Europe, but it is
the almost unanimous opinion of the foreign visitors to Russia at the
time, who wrote their impressions, that vice was particularly free at
Moscow. Unnatural vice was a matter of jest. When the theatre became
popular, as it presently did, the vice was coarsely suggested on the
stage. Word and gesture everywhere were licentious. As the immense
majority of the Russian families, which were usually large, huddled over
the stove in one room, day and night, during the six months’
winter, the atmosphere that the children breathed may be left to the
imagination. Except amongst the wealthier nobles, who were being
modified at this time by foreign culture and refinement, manners were
indescribably gross. On all this the mass of the clergy had, and
purported to have, no influence. The greater part of the monks were as
gross as the monks of Europe had been generally before the Reformation,
and the false standards of the better monks--who laid a fierce
anathema upon chess or the dance or Sunday-work and a blessing upon
ignorance--made their influence small and ineffective. Kiss the
ikons and be docile, was the general philosophy they recommended.

 [IMAGE: img086.jpg Ivan the Terrible, by Antokolsky]

That the early Romanoffs made a few improvements in this chaotic and
half-barbarous world is not saying very much to their credit. But beyond
a vague perception that more foreign light must be imported they had no
plan or statesmanship, and they proceeded piece-meal, under pressure.
The foreign merchants who were introduced or permitted to enter kept
industry and trade in their own hands, and did little for the native
development of Russia. The avarice and corruption of the court and
officials thought only of extortion, never of wise development. The
people, even of Moscow, sank under taxation and injustice, and a certain
measure of independence grew out of their very misery.

One day in the summer of 1648 the Tsar and the Patriarch were returning
to the palace from some ceremony when a frantic group of the people
approached with cries of grievances. They were, as usual, driven off;
but the distress was acute and soon an angry and dangerous throng of
soldiers, artisans, and small merchants and shop-keepers besieged the
Kreml and demanded the justice of the Tsar upon the bloodsuckers. Either
in fear or in anger--for Alexis was apt to boil over when the misdeeds
of some noble “son of a bitch” (as the Emperor put it) were brought to
his notice--the Tsar handed over to the mob two of the most hated
officials, and they were savagely murdered. The Clerk of the Council,
who was held particularly responsible for the salt-tax, which restricted
the supply of salt-fish, was assassinated on a dung-hill. The whetted
appetite then turned against Morozoff’s palace, but it was ingeniously
protected from destruction by the Tsar’s sending to the mob an assurance
that it was his own property. Morozoff himself was hidden in a monastery
until the fury of the storm spent itself, but the Tsar had to
promise to punish him, and to appoint a reform-commission. The autocrat
shed a flood of facile Moscovite tears as he protested that the people’s
grievances should be remedied; and his servants discreetly scattered
money amongst the soldiers, who formed the more dangerous part of the
mob. The fires which now threatened the entire city were extinguished,
and the people slowly and sullenly returned to discipline.

The insurrection had spread to the provinces, and the former republics
of Pskoff and Novgorod showed that their spirit of independence was not
extinct. Pskoff, in fact, inaugurated a genuine rebellion and had to be
reduced by the imperial troops, after a siege. Novgorod plundered the
stores of its foreign merchants and murdered more than one supporter of
the corrupt autocracy. When the Archbishop Nikon (of whom we shall see
more) attempted to defend the cause of the Tsar (as he was careful to
write to that monarch), his palace was invaded and he sank under a rain
of stones which nearly ended his life. Only the sworn promise of a
reform of the Empire put an end to the bloody insurrection.

It was under these circumstances, and with the added evil of an economic
system which failed yearly and a constant danger from the Poles, that
the second Romanoff began the reform of his kingdom. Morozoff was
condemned to a luxurious internment in a monastery, from which he
contrived for a long time to watch his interests and influence the Tsar,
and the sturdy Archbishop of Novgorod began to enjoy favour. A
commission of inquiry was appointed, and many reforms of the taxes, the
administration of justice, and the court were brought about.

In 1652 the Patriarch of Moscow died, and Nikon, who had steadily
advanced, was appointed to fill his place. For the next six years Nikon
was chief favourite and councillor, and his story is so characteristic
of the time that it must be briefly told. He was the son of a provincial
peasant: a man of robust constitution and conscience, and of no small
ambition. His success as a ruler of monks had won for him the
archbishopric of Novgorod, and he knew how to capture the nervous and
superstitious monarch. He claimed visions, and his shrewdness was at
least supported by a vigorous will. Before long the Tsar was little more
than an instrument of his will, and an abject spiritual pupil. He would
protest with tears that he was unworthy to wear the crown, and it was
only by reliance upon the Patriarch’s strong counsel that he was
dissuaded from abdicating.

The Tsar, like his predecessors, loved the elaborate ritual of the
Church, and Nikon interested him in the work of ecclesiastical reform.
The Slav translation of the Bible was very corrupt, and the corrupt
texts and ancient superstitious usages were to be rooted out. While
Poles and Swedes and Turks threatened--while the country rotted in
ignorance and economic folly--an immense zeal was concentrated upon
the purification of the text of the Scriptures and upon such grave
issues as the shaving of the beard, and the number of fingers that one
must use in making the sign of the cross. The court was purified of
“heretics” and the forces of the Empire were put at the
Patriarch’s disposal for the purification of the entire country.
Easy-going Russia had as yet not recognised its many heresies. Provided
that one repudiated the Pope one was esteemed orthodox; and indeed most
of the priests and monks were too densely ignorant to examine a
man’s orthodoxy.

It was now seen that a vast amount of heresy existed in Russia, and
every weird phase of dissent was truculently persecuted. Whole colonies
of monks were infected, and in places their monasteries sustained for
several years the attacks of imperial troops. Nikon was astute as well
as ambitious. He would invite some ragged popular fanatic of Moscow to
drink wine at his table, and would make great nobles tremble before his
power. He acquired enormous wealth, made an impressive display of pomp
and luxury, and contrived to indulge the heavy sensuality which then
belonged to all classes. Russia had become an autocracy. Nikon would
make it a theocracy.

But in such a court a man must have the truculence of Ivan the Terrible
or Peter the Great to hold such a power, and the undercurrents of
intrigue began in 1657 to weaken the Patriarch’s position. Old
believers, dissenters, and discontented nobles concentrated their hatred
upon him. It was in the summer of 1658 that he began to perceive the
effect. A foreign prince was to be entertained, and Nikon was not
invited to the banquet. He complained, and was insulted; and he next
perceived that Alexis was absent from _his_ functions. He resolved to
try a desperate remedy. Summoning his clergy and the people, he solemnly
and tearfully laid his sacred vestments upon the altar and declared that
enemies compelled him to abandon his high office. He retired to the New
Jerusalem monastery near Moscow to await the summons of the Tsar to
return to office, but no summons came.

For several years Nikon fiercely fought his clerical and lay opponents
from the monastery. “Brigand, pagan, stinking dog,” he howled at his
enemies; and they retorted that he was a “mad wolf.” In 1664 two high
oriental prelates, the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, visited
Moscow, and it was felt that they might be induced to end the scandal by
condemning Nikon’s reforms. But Nikon was undoubtedly right, and the
Tsar had to end it in his own way. The Patriarch was degraded and
imprisoned for life in a distant monastery. The issue is a sad page of
ecclesiastical history. The ageing Nikon lit up the monastery with
debauch. Not only did his large consumption of brandy immoderately
increase, but he loved to have women, especially young women, brought
into the monastery and stupefied with drink. At night his cell took on a
Rabelaisian aspect; and he died in an odour of sulphur, and was solemnly
buried with all the honours of a patriarch, in the year 1681.

By this time another interesting revolution had taken place at the
court. Power had passed to the Miloslavskis, the family of the Tsarina,
and they followed the familiar tradition. It may at least be said that
under their lead, and that of the boyar Nastchokin, a measure of reform
was carried out, and the country was strengthened against its enemies.
The Cossacks of the south were still under the dominion of Poland, and,
after many years of oppression and revolt, they appealed to Moscow for
help and protection. In 1654 the Tsar declared war upon Poland and
wrested a good deal of Russian territory from it. The Swedes also were
at war with Poland, and in the north the ambition of Russia clashed with
that of Sweden. Alexis made peace with Poland and entered upon an
unsuccessful war with Sweden. It ended indecisively, and the Poles
returned to the attack and inflicted severe defeats upon the Russians.
The war later ended in a costly compromise.

The economic condition of the country was such that the new drain caused
frightful distress, and the people of Moscow stirred once more. Copper
roubles had had to be coined, and poverty became deeper. One summer day
in 1662 the Tsar was at chapel in his country mansion, a few miles from
Moscow, when he was told that a crowd from Moscow beset the palace and
clamoured to be heard. His officers had dared to tear down a placard on
which they had exposed their grievances. The pious Tsar vigorously
refused to leave his devotions for so profane a cause, but he was
overruled, and he confronted the mob. He would, he said, proceed to
Moscow at the close of the service and make an inquiry. He must come at
once, with them, they answered; and a few of the bolder climbed the
balcony and pulled at his cloak. He was, however, permitted to return
and finish his devotions after he had taken a solemn oath to inquire
into their grievances. When he came down to carry out his promise, he
found that a larger and more violent crowd surrounded the palace. Two
regiments of the militia were summoned and, as the vast crowd still
jeered and flourished weapons, the order was given, and thousands of the
people were shot. Hundreds of others were afterwards exiled, and the
growing spirit of popular independence was, apparently, stifled.

Favourite succeeded favourite at court. Nastchokin and the Miloslavskis
gave way to a new and remarkable noble named Artaman Matveeff. Nikon
had, as I said, disposed the Tsar in favour of progress, of a kind, and
Matveeff was for still larger and more comprehensive progress. The
industrious and gifted son of a small official, he had become one of the
most accomplished and refined of the progressive party. His wife was a
Scottish woman of the Hamilton family. Like so many other foreigners,
many of the Scots who were driven from their country by Cromwell found
their way to Moscow and settled in trade there. The foreign colony
outside the walls grew, and its comparative refinement and culture
impressed the imagination of many of the Russians. Matveeff married the
refugee, and his home had a western complexion. The Scottish lady would
not be confined behind curtains. The furniture was of the more elegant
western kind. A library, and even a chemical laboratory, formed part of
the establishment.

Matveeff seems to have won the attention of the Tsar in the course of
some employment about the court, and he went on to secure his
friendship. He was promoted to the office of chief minister, and the
Tsar liked to visit him in his stimulating home. We may presume that it
was in the foreign quarter, where the neat brick villas, surrounded by
flower-gardens and shrubs, were in vivid contrast to the dull and
slovenly aspect of the clusters of wooden Russian houses. A new romance
of the court was born of this intercourse.

Matveeff adopted a beautiful orphan girl named Natalia Naryshkin, whose
father had been a captain of the militia. The Tsar, whose wife had died
in 1667, without (as we shall see) leaving a very promising heir to the
throne amongst her numerous children, was much struck with the charm of
Natalia, as she waited at table. Legend says that he at once offered to
“find her a husband.” He at all events decided to marry her, and told
Matveeff. But the courtier was too prudent to provide a wife for the
Tsar in this personal fashion. He persuaded Alexis to issue the
customary summons to a competition of health and beauty, and some
hundreds were lodged in the palace and gravely inspected. There seems to
have been some danger of Natalia losing her fortune, or else the comedy
was carried out very thoroughly. Another maiden was selected, and the
opponents of Matveeff pressed her charms. But it was decided that her
hands were too thin for a model of Russian beauty, and the intrigue was
defeated. The Tsar duly discovered the grace and gifts of the pretty
brunette Natalia--which he was not supposed to have seen in any
respectable Russian house--and in January, 1671, she was raised
to the throne.

The young girl had no conception of the opposition which her entrance
into the court would cause. Not only were the brother and other
relatives of the late Tsarina entrenched in lucrative positions, but
several of her children survived, and a grim silent struggle for the
succession grew up about the ageing monarch. Every act of the new
mistress was invidiously discussed. She declined to be secluded in
women’s quarters; she refused to have closed curtains to her litter when
she went abroad; she despised paint and the tawdry display which Russian
women usually made. A Russian envoy who had visited Italy brought news
of a magical form of entertainment known as a theatre, in which painted
scenes of castles and landscapes were put together and disappeared, and
life was remarkably imitated. Natalia and Matveeff set up a theatre,
and, although they did not venture beyond biblical plays, the monks and
reactionaries and envious made a great outcry. She brought into the
world, on May 20th, 1672, a wonderfully vigorous boy--the future Peter
the Great--and malicious tongues whispered that such a child was
assuredly not the son of Tsar Alexis, whose earlier sons had been
feeble. Two daughters followed in the next three years, and the silent
struggle became more tragic. Which of the two families--that of the
first or the second Tsarina--would secure the succession? The Tsar
himself brooded over the difficult problem; and in the midst of his
brooding, in 1676, he died, and left the settlement to the court.

Maria Miloslavski had had thirteen children, and of these two sons and
six daughters were alive when the Tsar died. The younger son, Ivan, was
a weak-witted boy whom none could seriously regard as a future ruler of
Russia. The two eldest sons had died. There remained Prince Feodor, and
the Miloslavskis had little trouble in securing his accession. A charge
of magic and other evil practices was trumped up against Matveeff, and
he was flogged and sent to Siberia. Natalia and her three children were
still at court, and she made a spirited stand against the grown-up
daughters of her predecessor and the three aunts who lived at court with
them. Her brother Ivan was banished, and she seemed to be in danger of
losing all hope, when a fresh court-revolution modified and complicated
the struggle.

The young Tsar, Feodor, was an invalid. Few expected him to live long,
and the prospect gave edge to the keen rivalry for power. But a former
tutor of Feodor’s elder brother now crept into favour and cut out the
Miloslavskis. This man and his brother were admirers of Poland, and, in
order to prepare the way for Polish influence, they induced the sickly
Tsar to wed a young and undistinguished woman of Polish extraction named
Agatha Grouchstska. Polish nobles and officers flocked to the court, and
an entirely new prospect was opened when, in July, 1681, a child was
born. Natalia and her children were now living in a village not far from
Moscow. The Miloslavskis had been disposed to make a nun of her, but
they were now fighting desperately for their own power. Agatha, to their
relief, died in childbirth, and the baby died a few weeks later. The
resolute friends of Poland made a last effort. They induced the dying
Tsar to wed a relative of his dead wife. But death made an end of the
mockery. Feodor died, in his twenty-first year, a few weeks after his
marriage, and the intriguing Poles were swept out of court.

Before the Miloslavskis had time to marshal their forces, the friends
and relatives of Natalia, the Naryshkin, got together the boyars and
persuaded them that the boy Peter was now the only possible heir to the
throne. The elder prince, Ivan, son of the first wife of Alexis, was, as
I said, an obvious imbecile. Peter, on the other hand, was a sturdy and
intelligent boy who promised to become a vigorous man. Before the day
was out on which Feodor died Natalia was summoned to Moscow by the news
that her son was Tsar, and she herself soon rejoiced in the titles of
Tsaritsa and Regent. Her brother was recalled, and a speedy messenger
was sent to bring back her friend and patron, Matveeff, from Siberia. It
was on April 27th, 1682, that Feodor died and Natalia returned to power.
On May 11th Matveeff arrived from Siberia, and received the respect of
the troops. The new regime seemed to be solidly established. And four
days later Moscow was shaken by one of the most sanguinary revolutions
that we find in its chronicles, and the Miloslavskis returned to power.
The story of that revolution introduces us to one of the strangest
princesses of the Romanoff house, who was to rule Russia for the next
seven years.



 CHAPTER VI
 A ROMANOFF PRINCESS

THE surviving family of Maria Miloslavski and Tsar Alexis consisted of
six sturdy daughters and one purblind, weak-pated boy. On the approved
principles of Russian, especially imperial, education, these daughters
ought to have been reconciled to the modest position to which the
inferiority of their sex condemned them, and, as their brother was
plainly incapable of ruling, they ought to have passed into convents or
been distributed amongst the households of wealthy courtiers. But there
was at least one daughter, Sophia, who had not the least intention of
submitting to the priestly theory. If her fifteen-year old brother could
make no effort for the throne, she would make it for him. She would
fight the hated Anastasia.

Visitors to the court have left us very different impressions of this
remarkable princess, but we have little difficulty in removing the thick
coat of flattery and obtaining a satisfactory glimpse of her. She was
twenty-five years old at the death of Feodor: a short, very stout, and
very vigorous young woman, her face covered to some extent with a fine
hair which gave her an even more masculine appearance. Probably she had
led the usual enclosed life during her father’s reign, but in the time
of her invalid brother she had had more freedom. She especially made the
acquaintance of Vassili Gallitzin, a very clever and accomplished
prince, of European culture, who overlooked her entire lack of personal
charm and--either then or at a later date--became her lover. In her
apartments she formed a literary circle, and through her visitors she
got into touch with remote elements of Moscow society.

One of these sections of the population of Moscow which a conspirator
would naturally explore was the military force known as the _streltsui_:
a privileged corporation of soldiers who handed on the office from
father to son and gave themselves airs of importance. We have no direct
proof that Sophia got into communication with this body, but the
historical facts, and the later action and expressions of Peter the
Great, seem to put it beyond question. The streltsui were mutinous at
the time of the death of Feodor, because their pay was, as usual, in
arrears. They were reduced to silence by the application of the knout,
publicly, to the shoulders of their officers, but they remained sullen
and inflammable. It is said that the agents of Sophia and her uncle went
amongst them distributing money and whispering poisonous libels. The
late Emperor, it was suggested to them, had died of poison.

When Matveeff returned from Siberia they greeted him with apparent
respect, and the court settled to its usual prosperous life. Four days
later, however, the Kreml awoke to find a grave and ominous movement
afoot. Twenty regiments of the streltsui had seized their arms and were
irregularly massed in front of the Kreml. The sleeves of their red
shirts were rolled up, as if for butchery, and a close observer would
have found that they reeked with vodka. Behind them was the rabble of
the town. The bells were calling shrilly from the steeples. Drums were
beaten, and cannon rumbled toward the palace. The servants of the court
learned that some one had spread amongst them a report that Princes Ivan
and Peter had been strangled, and a brother of Natalia had seized the
crown. Natalia hastened to show the princes at the top of the red
staircase, to the crowd, and for a moment it seemed to be baulked.
Matveeff and the Patriarch prudently addressed the men, and they were
about to disperse.

It is said that Prince Dolgoruki, one of the group of courtiers about
the Tsarina, then made offensive and arrogant remarks to the soldiers,
and the whole mass of inflammable material took flame. The prince was
soon flung from the head of the steps and caught on the spears of the
soldiers below. Matveeff was cut to pieces, and the murderers searched
the palace for Natalia’s brother. After murdering one or two wrong
men, they found him in the chapel and dispatched him. Another brother
was torn from Natalia’s arms and cut to pieces. Three younger
brothers escaped from Moscow. For three days the friends and relatives
of the Tsarina were sought and butchered: dragged by the hair through
the streets, knouted to death, flung from windows upon the spears,
roasted with red-hot spears, cut to pieces, and so on. One does not like
to dwell upon the horrors, but there will come presently a page in the
life of Peter the Great that requires explanation. Peter, then nine
years old, trembled by the side of his mother in the Kreml while her
friends and relatives were barbarously slain on every side--by the
streltsui. It is said that Sophia at length interceded and arrested the
butchery; and that she gave ten roubles each to the streltsui.

A week later the emboldened soldiers came again and demanded that the
idiot Ivan should be associated with Peter in the Tsardom. Most of the
boyars were opposed to so ridiculous and unprecedented a change, but the
Patriarch and other ministers were conveniently at hand, and it was
done. In a few more days there was a fresh riot. Ivan, being the elder,
must have precedence of Peter; and so it was appointed. Some historians
find it not unnatural that after this display of zeal for her brother
Sophia should provide a feast for the streltsui, and with her own plump
hand pour out their wine. Perhaps it was just as natural that the
streltsui should next return with a demand that Sophia be appointed
Regent for the young Tsars. The nobles now saw how the wind sat, and
they obeyed. A double throne was ordered of the Dutch merchants and,
when it came, Sophia had a hole, decently veiled, cut into the back, so
that she could listen to the audiences. She occupied the place of the
Tsarina and, with the aid of her lover Gallitzin, ruled the Empire.
Gallitzin was married, but, at Sophia’s suggestion, it is said, he
“persuaded” his wife to enter a convent, which left him free
to marry again. Apparently the virago would wed him and share the throne
with him.

But the streltsui were old-fashioned believers, and were in no mind to
see the traditions of Russian decency thus violated. Their murmurs were
strengthened by those of other malcontents. Sophia was more punctilious
about ritual and doctrine than conduct, and, like Nikon, she laid a
heavy hand upon dissenters. One of their leaders at Moscow was executed.
The rumble in the city grew louder, and Sophia, affecting at least to
believe that the streltsui now threatened her life, fled with her court
to the large and fortified monastery at Troitsa, eighteen miles from
Moscow. She prudently took with her Ivan and Peter, and she issued a
frantic summons to the country to protect her and them. Tens of
thousands of boyars and soldiers streamed to Troitsa, and the streltsui
became apprehensive. Their leader, Khovanski, and his son were invited
to come and confer with Sophia at Troitsa, and they unsuspectingly went.
They were arrested on the way and put to death; and the streltsui, cowed
by her strength, came, with ropes round their necks, to Troitsa, to ask
and obtain forgiveness.

But the discontent was not eased at Moscow, and the policy upon which
Sophia and Gallitzin now concentrated their resources fed the murmurs.
All Europe was alarmed at the continuous menace of the Turks, and in
1686 Gallitzin led south a large army for the purpose of chastising them
and their Tatar allies, and regaining territory for Russia. The costly
army, terribly reduced in the southern wilderness, was forced to return
without having even sighted the Turks, and the complaints and satire of
Moscow were loud. Sophia and Gallitzin endeavoured to cover the disgrace
by sending to Siberia an inoffensive general and loading the soldiers
with honours. It was, however, necessary to redeem the failure, and in
1689 a second grand army was entrusted to Gallitzin. His nerve may have
been shaken when, as he was starting, he found a coffin, placed by
unknown hands, on his doorstep; and he can scarcely have been unaware
that it was generally believed that during his absence Sophia consoled
herself with the attentions of his colleague Shakloviti. He failed once
more, and all Sophia’s pretence of triumph could not hide his
disgrace. She walked in triumphal procession, distributed brandy, and
heaped honours upon the “victors.”

Men now spoke of her with contempt. It was rumoured that she had a
melodramatic plot of marrying Ivan and--since he would have no
children--providing his wife with a lover. When this woman bore a son,
Peter could be thrust aside as not in the line of succession; and, when
Peter was excluded from the situation, the illegitimacy of the child
might be discovered, and Sophia and Gallitzin might rule in peace. The
plot was so ludicrous that she can scarcely have entertained it, but it
served to fan the growing resentment of her rule.

That rule was, however, now threatened by Peter himself. During these
years the boy had grown up sturdily, with his mother, in a village a few
miles from Moscow. On important occasions he would be driven into
Moscow, to sit beside his goggle-eyed half-brother on the golden throne,
but he detested the Kreml and loved the free, open-air life of the
village. His mother, Natalia, seems to have belied entirely the
excellence of her early years and scandalously neglected his education.
He learned to read, and he read a great and confusing assortment of
books of history and adventure. He learned to write, but the lesson
stopped at so rudimentary a stage that he always had great difficulty in
spelling. His days were spent amongst grooms, servants, and any boys
with whom he pleased to associate. He became a creature of impulse, and
in that world in which he grew up the impulses one followed were neither
gentle nor decent. The theory that Peter the Great profited by his rude
education in contact with nature and real human beings, instead of being
reared in the artificial atmosphere of the imperial terem, may point
with some pride to his energy, his promptness, his scorn of conventions;
but it must embrace also those impulsive outbursts of ferocity and those
unchecked debauches which kept his character throughout life little
above the level of a savage.

Peter had lately passed his seventeenth birthday when, in 1689,
Gallitzin returned from his second failure. The one imperial idea which
grew amidst his vices was the thought that he would some day command the
military forces of Russia, and his play constantly turned upon
soldiering. He formed companies out of his servants and associates. He
had a fort built at the village of Preobrajenshote, which he made his
chief centre, and a kind of rough, informal court grew up about him.
Nobles and boyars joined his military games, his mimic regiments; and
they joined also in his nightly revels. He must have heard much
disdainful talk about the campaigns of Prince Gallitzin, and no doubt
there were ambitious men who urged him to act. The city, he would know,
now openly complained. One day a paper was found in one of the squares
telling the finder that a valuable paper was hidden behind a picture of
the Virgin in a certain church. A crowd sought the miraculous
communication, and found a lampoon on the Regent Sophia.

 [IMAGE: img108.jpg View of Destroyed Tower of Nicholas,
 Arsenal, etc., in the Kremlin, A.D. 1812 From a Contemporary Drawing]

Hence when Sophia would prepare a triumphal return for her lover, and
grant honours to the defeated soldiers, Peter refused his imperial
consent. When Gallitzin thought it prudent to visit Preobrajenshote,
after Sophia had acted on her own account, Peter refused to see him. The
two camps began to glower at each other; and men began to pass from the
Kreml to the village.

During the night of August 7th, a few weeks after Gallitzin’s return,
Peter was roused from sleep with the news that his half-sister was
gathering troops at the Kreml which were to come and destroy him. It
transpired afterwards that there was a troop assembled at the Kreml that
night. Sophia declared that the soldiers were to accompany her on a
pilgrimage on the morrow, but it seems to be proved that Sophia and her
friends discussed the idea of dispatching Peter, and it was, apparently,
some of the soldiers themselves who brought the news. Peter was not a
youth of courage. He jumped out of bed, got a horse from the
stables, and rode hard, in his shirt, for the forest. A few officers and
soldiers took his clothes and joined him, and they galloped to the
famous monastery at Troitsa. They arrived at six in the morning, and
Peter, shuddering with fright, the tears streaming down his blanched
cheeks, implored the archimandrite (abbot) to protect him.

During the day Natalia joined her son, bringing the young wife, Eudoxia,
whom she had driven him to wed, but whom he had promptly discarded for
coarser pleasures. A few regiments of soldiers came, and the
monastery-fortress was put into shape for a fight. The majority of the
troops had not yet made up their minds which of the royal autocrats they
would support, and a period of uncertainty and parleying followed. With
Peter there were able nobles like Boris Gallitzin, cousin of Vassili,
and they urged him to be bold. He ordered detachments of the various
regiments at Moscow to appear before him at Troitsa. Sophia’s servants
intercepted the orders, and she bade the troops, under penalty of death,
to keep to their barracks. But the balance of confidence was on the
side of Peter, and as time went on furtive streams of soldiers and
nobles passed to Troitsa. A formidable army grew up there.

On the other hand, Moscow was very far from united in favour of Sophia.
Her troops melted away. The dissenters, whom she had heavily punished,
gathered boldly about the Kreml and noisily advised her to go into a
convent. Vassili Gallitzin wanted to go to Poland, to borrow an army.
Whether or no Sophia distrusted her nervous associate, she refused to
consent, and Vassili deserted her and retired to his country seat. She
sent the Patriarch to Troitsa, and presently learned that the prelate
had decided to remain there, a supporter of her detested half-brother.
Then she boldly set out for a personal discussion with Peter--she had
twice as much courage as he and, at that time, three times as much
energy--but troops barred her way and sent her back to Moscow. She threw
herself upon the gratitude of the streltsui, and they loudly swore that
they would die for her. But in a few days they came to demand that her
second favourite, Shakloviti, be surrendered, as a scapegoat, to
Troitsa, and, after a frantic and tearful resistance, she was compelled
to yield.

She had, for the moment, lost the struggle. Shakloviti was knouted until
he confessed that there was a plot against Peter, and he was then
beheaded. Vassili Gallitzin, the man of many accomplishments and few
capabilities, crawled to the feet of Peter’s rude throne and begged
forgiveness. He was banished to the frozen north. Other nobles were
executed or exiled, and Sophia was at her brother’s mercy. She would
foresee the hated sentence. Peter permitted her to choose her own
convent, and she chose the convent of the Virgin, near Moscow. She may
have smiled at his leniency.

But Peter had wanted merely security for his wild life, not the heavy
duties and responsibilities of reigning. His simple half-brother Ivan he
did not notice, and it is much to his credit--one of the very few things
to the credit of his personal character--that as long as the weak-witted
man lived Peter left him untouched. It was not the Moscovite way. He let
Boris Gallitzin and his mother’s relatives squabble for power, as was
the custom, and he returned to the almost useless, and partly
disgraceful, life he led on the outskirts of Moscow.

Peter was now a well-formed and handsome young giant, more than six feet
high, with intelligence enough to know his duty and strength enough to
achieve it. To say, as is said, that he was slowly preparing himself for
a great task is mendacious flattery. He was enjoying himself, and he
cared for naught else. What there is in his later life to entitle this
flower of the Romanoff shoot to be called “great” we will consider in
the next chapter, but well into his manhood he was merely vicious,
impulsive, and selfish. He disliked the pomp and conventions of the
court, and avoided them, mainly because he had the taste of a boor, and
was happier in squalid rooms where he could spit, and slop brandy, and
riot as he willed. His days, especially in the summer, were spent in
hard work, because he loved it. He worked at ship-building--there
was a large lake at hand--with just the same zest and motive that a
boy does, not from any far-sighted vision of a need to cleave a path for
Russia to the sea. He drilled and drilled, and gradually formed
regiments which would one day be famous, because he had a passion for
soldiering and, as I said, a vague imperial idea of one day commanding
armies and gaining great victories. And when the work was over, or when
the fierce grip of winter arrested all work, he sat down to orgies which
few could endure long.

Between the village where he lived and Moscow lay the foreign settlement
to which I have occasionally referred, and here Peter got some
education. The neat brick villas did not impress his imagination, for he
had not even an elementary taste, but he had a mechanical, inquiring
mind, and the instruments these foreigners brought into the heart of
Russia piqued and stimulated him. Somehow these people beyond the plains
could do everything better than the Russians. They could make clocks,
watches, astronomical instruments, elaborate tools, superb weapons,
magnificent fire-arms. He heard that they could make ships compared with
which his boats on the lake were like children’s toys. He must get these
secrets for Russia. One secret he learned--the making of fireworks--and
the whole country reeked and stank with his constant displays.

And they could drink, these English and Scots and Germans of the foreign
quarter. Caravans of wine and brandy poured into the quarter, and Peter
would come along, black with the smoke of his fireworks or streaming
with perspiration from drill or shipbuilding, and sit down to a glorious
carouse. His great friend was a Swiss named Lefort, whose capacity for
drink was phenomenal. Peter built a small palace, with a huge ballroom,
for Lefort, and made it the headquarters of their debauches. It was a
general rule that everybody was drunk every night. If a woman refused a
pot of brandy Peter would fetch her a clap on the side of the head to
which drunkenness was preferable. Decent women kept far away from the
two colonies. Peter sober had little self-restraint, but Peter drunk . . .

The shipping idea grew upon him until, in 1693--he had wasted four years
since the retirement of Sophia--he decided to visit Archangel. It is
curious to read of such a man asking, like a boy, his mother’s
permission, and promising not to go upon the water. He, of course, took
no notice of his promise when he got there and saw the ocean. A ship he
had ordered from Amsterdam was out in the roads and he impulsively
started off in a totally unsuitable boat to visit it. He was nearly
drowned. When he trod the deck, dressed as a Dutch captain, and saw the
great sails belly in the wind above him, he went into transports. He sat
for hours drinking hard with the Dutch sailors and listening to stories
of their voyages round the world. There was no country like Holland, and
he there and then adopted for Russia the Dutch red, white and blue flag,
reversing the order of the colours. In January he was summoned back to
Moscow with the news that his mother was dying. She died so slowly, and
kept him so long from the sea, that he cursed volubly. But he shed
copious tears, boy as he was, when she died; and he fled like the wind
back to Archangel.

That there was any large profit in this minute study of ships and
sailors may be confidently denied. Monarchs and statesmen have built
fleets without knowing the difference between port and starboard. Peter
was enjoying himself. But in his wild mind there was inevitably growing
a recognition of his position and opportunities. He was now more than
twenty years old, and intelligent. It was quite time that he recollected
that the destiny of Russia was entrusted to him. Of its internal
condition he does not seem to have had the glimmer of an idea, but it
suited his passion to believe that Russia needed a fleet, and must first
have a sea to put the fleet on. The powerful Swedes dominated the
Baltic, so he turned south and decided to take Azoff, on the Black Sea,
from the Tatars. He may have known that the country was disgusted and
scandalised at his idleness, and that Sophia watched eagerly from her
convent.

His expedition against Azoff was crudely conceived and a total failure.
He saw at least that he and his amateur foreign friends were inadequate,
and on his return to Moscow, he sent abroad for skilled men: sailors and
shipwrights from Holland and England, soldiers and engineers from
Austria and Prussia. Some came, and many of these, when they saw the
crowds and the country, returned. All drank copiously. But Peter’s
mighty energy was roused, and in a remarkably short time he had a
sea-going fleet built on the Don, ready to co-operate with his
land-attack upon Azoff. He took it, and returned in triumph to Moscow.

The one vague imperial idea in his wild and much-abused brain fed on his
success and grew larger. Russia must have a mighty fleet, like Holland
and England, and must learn this western art of doing things. He sent
fifty officers abroad for education. But he must see these wonderful
lands himself--he must know everything himself--and he began the
preparations for the famous melodramatic journey which shocked Russia,
and scandalised Europe, and undoubtedly brought great profit to him and
his country. Boyish in all things, he would go incognito. Russian
historians have invented a score of interpretations of every weird
action of the hero. He hated pomp and ceremony, it is said; but the
truth is that he sulked heavily when he was not recognised. The simple
fact is that he had a boyish, impulsive, muddled mind, its great
strength and originality marred by a wicked education and by debauch. He
would pretend that it was a deputation of Russian envoys, and he made a
sort of prince of his friend Lefort, giving him a suite of forty-four
gentlemen and servants. He would hide his own figure--he was six
feet eight inches in height, and wore disguises that would attract
attention at a hundred yards--in the crowd under the modest title
of Peter Mikhailoff, a non-commissioned officer of the Preobrajenshote
regiment.

The journey was to start in February, after the carnival revels, about
which a word may be said later. But a plot against his life was
discovered at the last moment, and he delayed to punish it. A former
servant of Sophia, named Tsikler, and some of the streltsui were
implicated in it. The implication of the Miloslavskis brought on one of
those blind rages in which he behaved as one demented. He had the body
of Ivan Miloslavski, which had rotted in the grave for twelve years, dug
up and brought on a sledge, drawn by twelve hogs, to Preobrajenshote.
There it was placed, in an open coffin, under the scaffold on which
Tsikler and his chief accomplice were hacked to pieces, so that the
blood of the traitors might splash upon what was left of the mouldering
remains of Sophia’s relative.

Leaving a large army to overawe Moscow, he set out in March, 1697. The
journey has been described so often that only a few details concerning
his behaviour need be noted here. From Sweden, where his incognito was
respected with a cynical correctness which infuriated him, he passed to
Germany, where the Elector of Brandenburg was eager to conciliate him.
His conduct was rather worse than that of an undergraduate on a holiday,
as he did not even know the elements of polite behaviour. The Elector
sent his Master of Ceremonies, a grave and learned gentleman, to greet
Peter at his lodging, since he refused to be recognised on the ship by
the prince sent to receive him. Peter snatched Johann von Besser’s
powdered wig and flung it away. “Who is this?” he demanded sullenly;
and, when the old gentleman’s functions were explained to him, he broke
out: “Let him bring me a wench, then.” Later, when a noble came to
announce that the Elector could not call upon him, Peter, drinking
heavily and slobbering over his friend Lefort, started angrily to his
feet, grasped the noble by the throat, and almost suffocated him. In the
street he met a lady of the court and startled her with a gruff
“Halt”; then he curiously examined the watch at her wrist and let her
go. One night, when he supped with the Elector, a servant dropped a
plate. Peter sprang up, sword in hand, livid with excitement; and he was
not pacified until the servant was flogged. They had, in the city, a
wheel on which criminals were broken, but they protested, in answer to
Peter’s wish to see it work, that they were without a criminal. “Let
them have one of my men,” he said coolly.

His adventures at Koenigsberg would precede him, and he made his way
loutishly from court to court until he reached Holland. Every one knows
the idyllic picture of Peter the Great serving a long apprenticeship to
shipbuilding in the village of Saardam. It is another exploded myth of
our childhood. Peter remained there only a week, staying at the village
inn (where he seduced the maid), smoking large pipes and drinking large
pots with the boatmen. That he used an adze is certain, but there was
little romance. His tall, slovenly form, very untidily dressed in Dutch
fashion, attracted the stones of the little boys, and he moved on. He
appeared in more polite quarters in a brown overcoat with horn buttons,
coarse darned socks, and dirty shoes.

Some one suggested that he would see better shipbuilding at London, and
he crossed, and bewildered London. He had a fine brown skin and
large handsome eyes and thick hair, but, apart from his habitual
untidiness of dress, he had a nervous malady which caused a twitching of
the limbs and a remarkable habit of grimacing. He constantly took for it
a powder made of the flesh and wings of the magpie. At table his habits
were atrocious. In fact, he and his servant Menshikoff discovered a
little tavern on Tower Hill where he could smoke his pipe and drink
peppered brandy as if he were at home. At Deptford, where he lived in
Evelyn’s house while he studied shipping, he made such filth and damage
that Evelyn estimated the repairs at 1,750 dollars. Here, as elsewhere,
his morals were notorious. Professor Morfill politely observes in his
“History of Russia”: “The great monarch was somewhat irregular in these
matters, it must be confessed.” The phrase would have sent the great
monarch into convulsions of horse-laughter. There is grave reason to
believe that such irregularities were not his worst vices.

The redeeming feature of his journey was that he learned a vast amount
in those few months. Much of his learning was a result of sheer nervous
instability and did more harm than good. He studied dentistry--the
dentistry of the seventeenth century--and took implements home with him,
to the terror of his friends. When his valet one day complained to him
that his wife refused to discharge her conjugal duty on the ground of
tooth-ache, the Tsar had the woman brought to him, and he extracted a
tooth. He gathered also a box of surgical instruments, and often used
them. On one occasion he tapped a poor woman of Moscow, who suffered
from dropsy, and caused her death. He pried into everything, rushing
from place to place and working with prodigious energy; though it is
said that he ended every day of his life intoxicated. What came of it
all for the development of Russia we shall see in the next chapter.

The voyage came to an abrupt end at Vienna in the late summer. There
had, he heard, been a new revolt of the streltsui. General Shein had put
it down, and severely punished the rebels, but Peter decided to return
to Moscow. On the day after his return the nobles came respectfully to
Preobrajenshote to do homage and share a banquet. Peter, half drunk,
called for scissors, and soon the beards of his nobles--the beards which
an almost sacred tradition imposed in Russia--were falling upon the
floor. Was it a drunken man’s joke? Peter did far worse things in
liquor. He cut right and left with his sword: he caned an offending
servant until he died; he ran his sword through an abbot who offended
him; he even one day knocked down and trampled on his intimate friend
Lefort. But this was not a jest. The ukase went forth that in future
Russians must shave. He was going to westernise Russia.

Some Russian historians, seeking to palliate the horror of what is to
follow, apply to it in some measure the idea of reform. The streltsui
were in the way of the reform of the army. They were undisciplined,
obsolete, incompetent. Their last revolt had given him the right to
destroy them, and he would. But there was much more than this. He was
convinced that Sophia was at the bottom of the revolt, and he would make
a terrible inquiry.

There seems to be little doubt that Sophia had fomented the spirit of
revolt and attempted to direct it in her interest. All the Russian world
was scandalised at the Tsar’s conduct, and she had from her convent
watched the spread of the discontent. At last, while Peter was in
England, some representatives of the streltsui had come to Moscow to
complain of their treatment. After the taking of Azoff Peter had brought
his favourite regiments to share his triumph and pleasure at Moscow, and
had left the streltsui to rebuild the shattered fortifications in the
distant south. With something of their old independence they had sent a
few men to Moscow to lay their grievances before the Tsar. There they
were astounded and further angered to hear that the Tsar had left Russia
months before, and no man knew where he was. There could be no redress
for grievances when the Tsar turned his back upon his people and wasted
his life amongst the detested foreigners. Sophia’s friends
and servants pressed the lesson deep. Was it not advisable to think of a
new ruler, one who would be considerate to the streltsui?

The men probably saw the great strength of the garrison at Moscow, and
they returned to Azoff only with a sullen report of their helplessness.
The military authorities then ordered part of the streltsui to the
Polish frontier, and this drove the men to fury. They set out on the
long march to Moscow, in full mutiny, with the intention, apparently, of
exterminating Peter’s supporters. But the Tsar had left his best
generals, Shein and Patrick Gordon, in command of the troops, and they
met the mutineers outside Moscow. After a futile parley the cannon and
the cavalry were turned upon the helpless foot-soldiers, hundreds were
slain and thousands captured. The revolt was thoroughly suppressed long
before Peter reached Vienna.

But the young Tsar was in one of his moods of deliberate ruthlessness.
The streltsui had deluged his mother’s palace with blood when he was a
child; they had commemorated his departure by a plot and had taken
advantage of his absence to rebel. These paid servants, these antiquated
soldiers, presumed to criticise his plans and fancy themselves as
masters of the Russian throne! And behind all their revolts he saw
always, barely concealed in the gloom, the figure of his masterful
half-sister. He resolved once for all to remove this source of irritation
from his Empire.

Immediately after his return fourteen torture-chambers were fitted up in
the village of Preobrajenshote, and the captured streltsui were soon
suffering all the agonies that Byzantine and Moscovite ingenuity could
devise and the fiendish temper of the Tsar could augment. Peter himself
hovered round while his victims writhed on human grid-irons or had their
flesh torn from the bones by the knout. Many of their womenfolk were
included in the ghastly torture, which went on night and day for three
days. But Peter got no confession of the guilt of his sister, and he
decided to act without it. On September 30th a first batch of two
hundred of the unhappy rebels, part of them scarred and drawn with
torture, were brought up for execution. It is credibly reported that
Peter wielded the axe himself and severed five heads. His companions
were told to follow his example, and few dared draw back. His infamous
servant, Menshikoff, is said to have cut off twenty heads, and the
horror of incompetent bungling by amateurs in such matters may be seen
in other pages of mediæval history.

In brief, the slaughter extended over several months, and thousands of
the streltsui were executed. The ancient corporation was entirely broken
and the fragments were included in the new army. In the Red Square at
Moscow the heads of the rebels remained on the points of pikes until
they rotted into grinning skulls. The wives and children were driven
from Moscow. It was decreed that none should give them bread, and they
disappeared silently into the plains and forests beyond. How many
escaped famine or the wolves no man knows. Russia learned that it had an
autocrat: Peter the Great.

And this meant the end of the career of the masculine Sophia. As she
shuddered in her convent two hundred of the rebels were brought up and
hanged within sight of her windows. Some of them held in their dead
hands copies of a petition to her to see their grievances remedied. Then
Peter turned upon her. She must lose her rank, have her hair shorn, and
pass the rest of her life in strict seclusion as a nun. With the name of
“Sister Susanna” the forceful and unscrupulous woman passes out of
sight. Although there was no evidence of her guilt, and it is indeed
unlikely that she was involved, Peter’s wife, Eudokia Lapukhin, was
condemned to the same fate. She was at least guilty of refusing to share
Peter’s tastes, and he had lived little with her. He was free; and from
the horrible shambles he turned to the revels of the carnival of 1698
and the more congenial company of the women of his favourite district.



 CHAPTER VII
 THE GREAT PETER

THE Tsar Peter was near the end of his third decade of life when he
broke the power of the streltsui and definitely expelled his sister from
the sphere of public life. The fortune and destiny of Russia now lay in
his hands, and the heavy discontent of his people, coerced as it was by
the appalling punishment of the rebels, invited him to take up the
serious duties of kingship. It would be, even if we admitted that the
intelligence of a genius was allied with his strange character, too much
to expect that such a man would settle down to the study of the
constructive problems that confronted him. He was at all times incapable
of sustained intellectual concentration, of patiently working out into
detailed plans the large ideas which arose in his feverish imagination.
Congenital nervous disease might have been corrected by the hard labour
in the open air in which he delighted, but the debauch which regularly
closed his labour undid its effect. He returned, even after his recent
ghastly experience and his tour of Europe, to his disordered ways.

It will be enough to illustrate the kind of life which he and his
companions led by a short account of one of their pastimes. I have said
that the expedition to Holland and England, which had in part the object
of seeking grave alliances for the Empire in the west, was preceded by
the revels of the carnival. These took the form of such pageantry and
rioting as one found in most countries of Europe at the time, but there
was an incident of the Moscow procession which introduces us to a
startling feature of the life of Peter’s circle. One of the leading
figures of the procession was a drunken old man who was dressed in
ludicrous imitation of the Patriarch, the head of the Russian Church,
riding on an ox, and accompanied by his spiritual court, an equally
drunken and dissolute crowd, on the backs of hogs, bears, and goats.
These were Peter’s intimate friends, and the entire masquerade was
designed by him.

The mock Patriarch was Zotoff, the tutor whom Natalia had given her son
in his youth and who had suffered Peter to contract at an early date a
love of every kind of dissoluteness. Some time before this year Peter,
who led the revels in the foreign quarter and outdid all in boisterous
practical jokes, had dubbed the old man--he was now nearly seventy,
though he took his wine and brandy with the youngest--“Archbishop of
Presburg and Patriarch of the banks of the Iaouza [the neighbouring
stream], and the whole of the Kaukaui [a slang name of the wild foreign
quarter].” The joke grew upon the heavy taste of the Tsar. He declared
himself the Patriarch’s “deacon,” and his friends were formed into a
group of “cardinals,” who must hold occasional “conclaves.” The ridicule
of the Papal Court was doubtless appreciated at Moscow, but even the
most thoughtless may have been sobered by the equal burlesque of the
head of the Russian Church. Historians again break into a dozen
different explanations. Some hold that he was preparing the way for his
destruction of the power of the Russian clergy: which is to credit him
with a large foresight and deliberateness of action that one finds it
impossible to accept. It is more likely that he acted from sheer mockery
of religion, adding the Papal details so as partially to disarm or
perplex his Russian pietists. We need not suppose that Peter had
definite sceptical convictions. There were few definite convictions of
any kind in his sodden mind.

Earlier Tsars had humbly walked beside the Patriarch, holding the
bridle of his mule, in the great procession on Palm Sunday. Peter
substituted for this the procession of his mock Patriarch, an aged toper
who must have made a pretty Silenus, and his court. The “cardinals”
were, as I said, the hardest drinkers and most dissolute adventurers of
Peter’s intimate circle. The Frenchman (or Genevan) Lefort and the
Scot Patrick Gordon were prominent amongst them; and there were other
foreigners. They sprang from the lowest ranks of the people or from the
highest nobility. Race, religion, or rank counted for nothing in
“The Council of the Mad Ones,” as the society was (amongst
other titles) known. From cunning and policy, and out of his constant
itching to test his authority, Peter included also men of high taste and
character. When men were forced to take quarts of wine and brandy they
were apt to speak their thoughts, and Peter always kept a sober ear.

This was the detail of the carnival-procession of 1697. It was repeated
in 1698, at the conclusion of the red horror of the streltsui. A mitre
crowned the white locks of the intoxicated Zotoff, who was otherwise
dressed as Bacchus, and a crowd of Bacchantes (probably the lady-friends
of the cardinals from the foreign quarter) performed the well-known
lascivious dance around him. With that freakishness which often gave
something akin to the license of insanity to Peter’s imagination, he
ordered his Bacchantes to bear burning tobacco-leaves. In England he had
disposed of the tobacco-monopoly, and he was determined--in spite of the
frowns of the clergy--to make his subjects smoke. The “Mad Ones”
followed on their fantastic steeds.

It is necessary, if one would pass a comprehensive verdict upon Peter
“the great,” to tell that this was something far more than a
carnival-jest. He maintained the institution all his life, and was ever
inventing fresh enormities for it. When a man was, willingly or
unwillingly, appointed to the “council,” he had to go to the house of
the Patriarch, where four stutterers belonging to the large troupe of
entertainers in the Tsar’s household introduced him. He received his
red cardinalitial robes, and went to the “Consistory,” or meeting of
the cardinals. There they sat on casks before the throne of Zotoff,
were served with much wine by men dressed as Roman monks, and went in
procession to the “Conclave,” which was held in a house prepared as a
parody of the Sistine Chapel at Rome during an election of a Pope. They
were confined there for three days and nights, and plied constantly with
drink by Peter’s servants; and Peter himself listened in secret
for any hint of treasonable inclination. The kind of language used, and
the things done, may be gathered from the extant letters of Peter to his
Patriarch. At their normal meetings various women, of whom we will see
something presently, were present.

Two incidents will show how Peter sustained to the end of his life the
frame of mind which he shows in these things; for it was he who
laboriously invented every detail of the riot. In 1714, in the midst of
his heavy struggle with Sweden, he decided that he would marry Zotoff,
who was then eighty-four years old, to a lady of noble birth sixty years
old. The most elaborate and costly preparations were made for months,
and a brilliant pageant was put upon the streets of St. Petersburg. All
the nobles, sober or dissolute, had to take part, dressed as savages or
bishops, making a hideous discord with every instrument of noise that
could be invented. A banquet and mighty drinking bout, prolonged for
several days, closed the ceremony.

Zotoff died a few years later, and it was necessary to proceed to the
election of an “Archbishop of St. Petersburg in the diocese of
drunkards, gluttons, and madmen.” The Conclave was held in a mock
nunnery, presided over by a lady of noble birth and dissolute habits;
and the “cardinals” kissed her breasts as they took the ballot-balls
(eggs) from her hands. Later still, within a few years of his death,
Peter decided that his new Patriarch must marry Zotoff’s widow. After
ceremonies which could only partly be described the couple were married,
thoroughly intoxicated, and put to bed in a monument in the public
square where the populace could enjoy the spectacle in its own
indelicate way. In fine, only two years before the Tsar’s death, the
Patriarch died, and it was necessary to elect another. Peter’s idea on
this occasion, which was carried out, was to enclose the “cardinals” for
twenty-four hours, saturating them all the time with wine and brandy,
and then let them choose a spiritual head.

It is not “history” delicately to suppress these things, or merely hint
that Peter sought relief from his colossal labours in somewhat
boisterous jokes, and then enumerate the deeds by which he earned the
title of “the great.” These, and his ferocious bursts of rage--his
brutal attacks on a man or woman who offended, and his truculent torture
and murder of graver offenders--are part of his normal character. He had
no feeling of decency or morals; indeed his whole life was a mockery of
it. He was wholly devoid of any kind of fine or tender sentiment.
Occasionally, with a dull air of generosity, he pardoned an offender;
and he set up many philanthropic institutions at Moscow and St.
Petersburg. Habitually he was coarse and unrestrained in the last
degree. He would in public play with the breasts of noble ladies of the
court, and many of his private acts and expressions cannot be described.
I am not stressing the fact that Peter was immoral, which is not
inconsistent with greatness, even of character. He was, in these and a
thousand other things, little, petty, shallow, uncivilised.

It would, however, be not less unjust to dwell upon these matters to the
exclusion of those services to his country which have, it is generally
understood, made Peter the one great monarch of the Romanoff dynasty.
These must be duly considered. They fall naturally into two categories:
the reforms by which he at least broke some of the ice which locked
Russia in its rigid mediævalism, and the wars by which he lessened the
power of its hereditary enemies and profitably extended its boundaries.

The habit of writing history from a dynastic point of view is so
deep-rooted that many a reputation lingers in our democratic age after
the sentiments on which it was originally based have disappeared. This
applies in part to Peter’s fame as a conqueror. He created an army and a
navy, he weakened and thrust back the Swedes, and he regained a large
part of southern Russia. These were large and needed services,
but--without passing minutely from battlefield to battlefield, which is
not the purpose of this study--we must see how far these aims were
plainly conceived in a mastermind and with what ability they were
achieved.

Peter had spent ten precious years playing at soldiers and making boats
in the vicinity of Moscow. The shallowness of the plea that he was
seriously preparing for a great task is seen the moment he sets out on
his first military adventure. He decided to attack Sweden. Some
historians would have us picture the young genius brooding over a map of
Russia and considering in which direction he may cut a channel for its
commerce (which hardly existed) to the sea and the broad world beyond.
That was not his way. His one imperial idea was, as I said, that he
would create an army and a navy, and would use them. It was fairly
obvious that they must be used against Sweden, but his journey had, in
any case, lodged this idea in his mind. It had begun in Sweden, where
the King had treated the young boor with the disdain he felt for his
person and his power. It ended in Poland, which had succumbed to Sweden
and hated it. From Vienna, at the end of his trip, Peter had gone to
Rawa and spent a few days with Augustus II of Poland. Augustus was a man
after his own heart: a tall, strong man, a great hunter and hard drinker
and loose liver. They talked much about Sweden and, with the fervour of
intoxicated youth, decided to smite that formidable power.

Sweden was still at the top of the wave which lifted up and cast down
one European nation after another, and many powers were jealous of it.
Peter and Augustus entered upon a crude diplomatic campaign for the
formation of a league against it. The Prussians were too cool and
cynical to promise to do more than share the spoils of any victory, but
the Danes and Dutch consented. In 1700 Peter secured peace with the
Turks in the south and joyously led his grand new army, of 40,000 men,
to the siege of Narva. He would, he said, avenge the insults put upon
his imperial majesty in Sweden: to which he had gone as a
non-commissioned officer of the Preobrajenshote regiment. His artillery
made little impression upon the town, and his long carouses left him
imperfectly informed on the larger situation. In point of fact the King
of Sweden had patched up a peace with Denmark and was hurrying to Narva.
On November 17th the Tsar heard that King Charles and his seasoned
soldiers were a day’s march away from his camp, and--he fled.
It is suggested that his officers prevailed upon him not to expose his
valuable life to danger. It is claimed that he hurried off to spur on
his lagging reinforcements. It is said--by himself--that he
did not know of the nearness of the Swedish King. From all which the
majority of soldiers and historians conclude that Peter fell into a
panic at the first smell of real gunpowder, and fled. His grand new army
could do no better, and a Swedish force not one-fourth as large sent the
Russians scurrying back to their frontier.

 [IMAGE: img134.jpg Peter the Great]

It seems to have been the laughter of Europe which roused the Tsar from
the half-hysterical condition into which he fell, and it may be said
that from that time forward he became a more vigorous and skilful, and
generally courageous, commander. That he ever became a great soldier is
emphatically denied by many competent authorities. But he had, we saw,
two qualities of value: a colossal nervous energy, and a great promptness
to seek teachers in the more advanced west. He entered upon terrific
preparations for a more promising campaign. Brushing aside the clergy,
he melted down their bells to make cannon, and he, swinging from place
to place with giant strides, spurred his subjects to throw all their
energy into the task. That he had a clear and statesmanlike idea of
opening “a window upon Europe” may very well be questioned. It is more
in accord with his psychology to suppose that his mind did not go much
beyond a fierce resolve to beat Sweden. But out of his very need to
create an army for this purpose he began to develop his Empire. He
needed money, and his merchants must earn more money. He needed metal,
and it must be found. He was stung by the opinion of the world that
Russia was still barbaric, and he struck fiercely at cherished old
traditions. He saw the Church, especially on its monastic side, as a
great fat pale fungus sucking the national sap, and he attacked it.

Many of his internal reforms belong to this period. In 1698, we saw, he
had fallen, scissors in hand, upon the Russian beard, and desecrated it.
A ukase ordered all Russians to shave the chin, and even this change
cost a mighty struggle. Ancient texts of Scripture plainly sanctioned
the beard: sacred ikons showed that the saints, and even Christ, had
always worn beards: and, in fine, it was not comfortable to have to face
the piercing Russian winds in the winter with a clean-shaven face. Peter
fought for years against this symbol of the power of antiquity. Soldiers
were put at the doors of churches and instructed to _pull out_ the
beards of rebels. Heavy fines were imposed.

With this went a reform of the clothing. Long, skirted coats were
traditional, and had become sacred; and they were considered warmer in a
Russian winter. Peter ordered shorter and more workman-like coats, and
patterns were exhibited in the streets to the outraged people. The
nobles were, as a rule, not unwilling to dress in western fashion. The
poor were allowed a few years in which to wear out their long coats. But
it was a long and futile struggle, as pictures of Russian peasants show
to-day. Even women were ordered to trail less cloth and, to the
boisterous amusement of the crowd, the skirts of the recalcitrant were
lifted up in the street by officials and torn or sheared.

The position of woman was a more direct religious concern. The customs
which made the Russian woman, especially of the middle and better class,
a slave of her menfolk and easy victim of the clergy, had been
elaborated and codified by the clergy themselves, though in substance
the zealous enclosure of women was, we saw, borrowed alike from Tatars
and Greeks. A girl lived in terror behind locked doors, growing fat for
the marriage-mart. The way out from her quarters was through the
father’s room, and, whenever she was suffered to go out, she was
heavily veiled. Marriages were arranged by deputies. Even during the
ceremony bride and bridegroom were separated by a curtain. The bride
went to bed while her new husband was thoroughly intoxicated
below--the worse the bargain his relatives had made for him the
more carefully he was stupefied with drink--and when he at length
reeled into the room, she showed her face for the first time. Usually he
did not examine her face closely. If he were sober enough to find that
he had a pock-marked, cross-eyed, lean and skinny spouse, he might there
and then bully her into a promise to enter a nunnery and leave him free.
The marriage was generally consummated before he came to dislike her,
but the resource was still open to a resourceful man. The stick was a
powerful instrument of persuasion, and it was used generally and
brutally. Women drank heavily in their miserable quarters, and remained
in the last degree of ignorance and superstition.

Peter’s mother, and the example of Sophia, had already raised some
defiance of this tradition. Peter himself loathed it and violently
assailed it: partly because it was one of the antique practices which
made Russia ridiculous and kept it unprogressive, partly because he
genuinely wanted the women, morals or no morals, to enjoy life as his
gay women-friends of the foreign quarter, and later of his court, did.
He kicked over the barriers and encouraged women to come out. He ordered
a six weeks’ interval between betrothal and marriage, and wanted
girls to see men before they married them. He gave his daughters a
French governess, and urged his nobles to do the same, or send their
daughters abroad to be educated. In 1704 he startled and outraged Moscow
by having a procession of young ladies on the street, scattering flowers
and showing their fresh faces to the world.

Toward the close of his reign (in 1718) he desperately ordered his
people to hold periodical receptions, or “drawing-room” entertainments,
in their houses from four in the afternoon until ten. It is understood
that his recent visit to Paris gave him the idea. Chess and smoking and
dancing and drinking--but no cards or dice--were to be provided, and men
and women were to mix socially. But social intercourse enforced by the
knout is not apt to be genial. They were, as far as the law was obeyed,
melancholy entertainments.

To all these reforms the clergy and monks were opposed, and he quickly
attacked their power and wealth. In the December of 1699 he flouted the
Church-calendar and decreed that henceforward, as in the rest of the
civilised world, the year would begin on the First of January. An entire
reform of the calendar was beyond even his audacity, and Russia still
lingered behind the world. In 1700 he ordered the opening of
apothecaries’ shops in Moscow, and, although the bulk of the
messes sold in such places at the time were not much more efficacious
than charms or the prayers of the monks, it was a healthy assault on
tradition and the trade of the priests. In the same year he began his
direct assault upon the ecclesiastical authorities.

The Patriarch of Moscow died in October, and Peter boldly refused to
appoint a successor. It could not be pretended that such an institution
was an essential part of the Russian tradition, as the patriarchate of
Moscow had been founded only by Boris Godunoff, but the murmurs of the
clergy may be imagined. Peter appointed instead a “Superintendent of the
Patriarchal Throne,” and through this man he got control of the wealth
and affairs of the Church. A separate department took control of the
monasteries, and the Tsar made a bold attack upon this economic evil.
Monasteries and convents were full of men and women who were religious
only in name and dress. Frequently they took no vows, and their sole
intention was to enjoy the immunities, the well-fed idleness, and the
frequent dissoluteness of the religious institutions. As in other lands,
centuries of ignorant piety had showered wealth upon an institution
which at first had won sympathy by its austerity and now retained it by
hypocrisy. Such a condition, when Peter sought for war-purposes every
rouble he could get, stirred his wrath, and he had little piety to
restrain him. He “regulated” the incomes of the monasteries
and convents in such fashion that they became less attractive to
economic parasites and sensual hypocrites. As time went on he increased
the restrictions of monastic life, and tried to compel the monks to
teach or work.

To the dissenters he was, naturally, more lenient than his predecessors,
though he took advantage of their nonconformity to secure heavy fines
for his treasury; and to foreign heretics he gave complete liberty.
Clergy, monks, and dissenters roared their discontent, openly calling
him “Antichrist,” but Peter was content with an occasional execution or
application of the knout to some monk’s broad shoulders. In 1721 he at
length conceived a plan of Church-government, and created the
“Ecclesiastical College,” as the supreme clerical authority, which
became in time the Holy Synod. His futile efforts to educate Russia out
of its morass of superstition and conservatism will be noticed later.
For the moment I would recall only how the mighty problems raised by the
appalling condition of the country forced themselves upon him in the
course of his one clearly conceived design: the destruction of the
Swede. When he thus saw an abuse he smote it, angrily and
unscientifically. He had not the mood or mind to sit down to the
elaboration of a constructive programme. He probably devoted more time,
and more cheerfully, to creating the rules and orgies of his “Mad
Ones” than to the conception of a system of education.

In 1701 he, after a mighty drinking bout with Augustus, made a fresh
treaty with Poland and renewed the war with Sweden. The war went on with
varying success until, in 1703, Peter took the marshy region which
included the mouth of the river Neva. For some reason--it may have been
because it was believed that here Rurik and his brothers had entered
Russia--the Tsar fell into the wildest rejoicing, and began almost
immediately to form a wooden settlement on the bank of the river. This
was the humble foundation of St. Petersburg. It seems to have been at a
later date that he conceived the idea of making it the new capital of
Russia, and his choice has been very severely criticised. For a
metropolis it was too near Sweden, the great hostile power of the time,
and not easy of defence. For commercial purposes it was inferior to Riga
or Libau, which he afterwards took, and could only with great difficulty
and sacrifice be converted at all into a centre of commerce. But Peter
loathed Moscow, with its musty air of conservatism and its gilded
palaces and churches. He must have a new capital, and a centre of the
northern region he was gaining. His genius was energy, not insight or
foresight. With the labours of--it is said--hundreds of thousands of
Swedish prisoners, whose lives were recklessly squandered, he raised the
primitive St. Petersburg and embodied in it, as he thought, the new
spirit of progress.

He was now creating, with dim large vision of a great future, and his
wild Dionysiac nature rejoiced in the labour and in the rewarding feast.
In the next year, 1704, he took Narva, after a long and bloody siege;
and in his morbid nervous way, with his wretched lack of self-control
and chivalrous feeling, he struck the brave Swedish commander across the
mouth, for resisting so long, when that general was brought before him,
and, with pitiful spite, had the body of the man’s wife dug up and
thrown into the river. Still he had to fight on for years, with varying
fortune. All the time he wrung money out of his country and urged his
generally incompetent and despised envoys abroad to get for him money
and allies. Poland deserted him and made peace with Sweden; and just at
that time trouble arose in the south, among the Cossacks, to divert his
attention.

Ivan Mazeppa, the hetman of the Cossacks of Little Russia, or the
Ukraine, disliked finding taxes for Peter, and entered into negotiations
with the Swedes. The Ukraine was, like most of Russia, full of bitter
discontent. There seemed some hope of securing independence. A Cossack
chief whose daughter was seduced by Mazeppa fled to Peter and warned
him; but Peter’s insight failed, as it often did, and he handed
the informer to Mazeppa for punishment. Mazeppa continued to correspond
with the Swedes and promise co-operation if they invaded Russia. It was
the early summer of 1708 before Charles of Sweden entered Russia, and
Peter decided to baffle him as Napoleon would be baffled at a later
date. The Russians fell back, laying waste the provinces as they
retired, and drew the Swedes on to spend a winter in the frozen plains.
The details do not concern us. Charles in time found himself threatened
with famine. Mazeppa found, when he was at length stung into action,
that only two thousand of his Cossacks would follow his adventurous
banner; and he packed his gold in two barrels and set out on his
hopeless enterprise. And Peter, reaping at last the reward of all his
toil, fell upon the Swedes at Poltava and defeated them.

It is true that King Charles was wounded and the Swedish army worn and
demoralised; and it is true that Peter, eager to celebrate his victory
in the usual way, allowed the Swedes to retire more cheaply than a great
commander would have done. But he had redeemed his failures, and had
dealt a great blow at Sweden. Incidentally he had done much to recover,
or gain, his personal repute, so badly shaken since he had fled at
Narva. In the battle of Poltava he faced the bullets, and got one
through his hat and another--rather a disputable one this--on
the breast, which broke its force miraculously on his jewelled cross. He
was soon back in Moscow arranging a pageant. He posed, as Hercules in
the procession.

The next few years were spent in feverish dreams of larger armies and
imperial expansion, checked periodically by bad diplomacy and poor
economics. His generals took Riga for him, however, and overran the
Baltic provinces. Then the wily Swede roused on his flank a more
terrible enemy than the Cossack. At the beginning of 1711 he heard that
the Turks and Tatars were afield, and he hurried south with 45,000 men:
also many thousand women and camp-followers, for, when the Tsar would
take his Catherine, other officers would have their wives or some
equivalent. The result was that the large and unwieldy body soon found
itself in a worse situation than that into which the Russians had drawn
Charles. An army of Turks and Tatars, four or five times as numerous as
the Russians, closed round them on the river Pruth. There was no escape.

From the many accounts of Peter’s behaviour on that occasion one seems
bound to conclude that he lost his new courage, and fell into a state of
maudlin despair. It seems also to be a myth that his Catherine roused
and saved him. His generals fortunately knew the venality of Turkish
commanders, and a very heavy bribe--including, apparently, Catherine’s
jewels--passed to the Grand Vizier’s camp. The terms, one would think,
were hardly worth so large a bribe. Peter was to evacuate Azoff and
all the territory in the south that he had taken from the Turk: he was
to give up the Baltic provinces to Sweden, except the district at the
mouth of the Neva, for which he passionately pleaded; and he was to
pay a very large indemnity. He swaggered back to Moscow and endeavoured
to brazen it out.

Again he settled down to stern exertions, to prepare an army and navy
and seek allies. In 1717 he went to Paris in search of aid, carefully
leaving Catherine behind, though (as we shall see) he had now married
her. His conduct was more sober than on the earlier journey, though it
was eccentric enough and gave Paris food for talk for many years. When
they had at length found Peter a lodging more or less to his taste, he
declared that the young king, Louis XV, must come to see him; and, eager
as he was to see the sights of Paris, he kept his hotel three days and
nights in the hope of forcing the visit. But we need not again enlarge
upon his eccentricities. He came away without hope of alliance, and
France played with him to the end of his life. Two years later he
proposed to marry his daughter Elizabeth to Louis XV, having failed to
get the grandson of George I. When that project was at last very firmly
declined, he asked at least for a prince of the blood, and he was
humoured with negotiations until he died. As we shall see, Elizabeth was
the illegitimate daughter (legitimised by later marriage) of Peter and a
peasant-woman who had been for a time almost common camp-property.

In brief, to make an end of wars, Peter took Finland and beat the Swedes
on the Baltic, but he brought the terrible English fleet upon his new
vessels. A peace was arranged at Nystadt in 1721, and, for a payment of
two million crowns, Peter was suffered to keep his gains on the Baltic.
There was a stupendous flow of beer and wine and brandy at St.
Petersburg. Peter lit the fireworks with his own hand, and, although the
Senate now gravely nominated him “Father of his Country” and “Emperor of
all the Russias,” he mingled with the crowd, wore a fancy dress, and
danced and sang and leaped on to tables like a school-boy.

Peter had, therefore, as a result of twenty years of costly warfare,
which embittered his subjects, been permitted to _buy_ the fringe of
territory which brought his Empire to the shores of the Baltic: the
Cossacks of the Don and the Ukraine were, of course, already subject to
Russia, and were merely prevented from breaking away. This, and the
creation of an army and navy and lowering of the prestige of Sweden,
were his accomplishments on that side. His other ventures in the way of
expansion were crude and unsuccessful. Several times he made fruitless
efforts to reach India and Persia, but was always defeated. In 1721 the
governor of Astrakhan sent word that the Turks would forestall his
design upon Persia, and in the following May, having peace with Sweden,
he led 100,000 men south from Astrakhan. The expedition was poorly
organised, and had to return in some disgrace.

In the following year, 1723, he made his last and wildest effort. Two
frigates set sail, secretly and hastily, from the port of the capital,
and were presently driven back by storms. These two vessels, of poor
capacity, had actually been ordered by Peter, in the prime of his age,
to take the island of Madagascar, and possibly sail on from there to
India! Peter had heard that the Swedes were about to do this, and he had
written a letter to “the king of Madagascar,” urging him to see that a
Russian was better than a Swedish protectorate. Such was the value of
the Tsar’s famous training in ship-building that he insisted that a few
useless alterations should be made and the boats should start again, and
he fell furiously upon his officers when they pointed out the
impossibility.

The internal reforms which he effected were of that large, violent, and
unsystematic character which one would expect from his nature. I have
described some of these, and shown how they were, in great measure,
angry and impulsive thrusts at evils which thwarted his plans.
Brigandage was still very common, on a large scale, in Russia, and
interfered with the industry which was to supply his sinews of war, so
Peter attacked it vigorously. Mendicancy had, as everywhere in the
Middle Ages, become an opportunity of virtue and a wicked leak of the
nation’s energy. The lash of Peter’s knout fell upon the
beggars. Men still killed each other instead of killing Swedes and
Turks, and Peter forbade them to carry knives. He fostered and protected
home-industries, and sent young men to Holland and Italy to learn
trades. He spurred the native production of iron and copper, sent
expeditions in search of gold, dug miles of canals, and tried by heavy
punishments to break Russian traders of their notorious dishonesty. He
pressed reform in agriculture, introduced breeding studs, and slightly
alleviated the lot of the serfs, who were now sold like cattle or
negroes. He regulated municipal life, dividing the country into
administrative areas and created a Senate. Nothing was done thoroughly,
and all was done for the purpose of extracting (by a crude fiscal system
and thoroughly dishonest officials) more money for the army and navy.
Yet these were all valuable innovations, and they entitled Peter, as far
as they went, to a name only a little less than “great.”

His most beneficent design, and his chief failure, was in the matter of
education; general illiteracy was still the rule in Europe. Russia was
merely a few degrees worse than other countries in that respect. But
social visionaries were appearing here and there, pointing out the
connection between ignorance and crime and poverty, and some of them
found the ear of Peter. Impulsively, as usual, he declared that he would
have universal, compulsory education in Russia. A Ukase of February
28th, 1714, ordered the opening of provincial schools, and Peter rushed
to other tasks. Five years later he learned from an official report that
one such school had been opened, and it had twenty-six pupils. He
returned again and again to the subject, and failed as much from his own
lack of patient study as from the general hostility of his subjects. His
ideas of schooling were extremely crude, and they stultified themselves
in practice. All that we can say is that, as in the case of most of the
other reforms, he did bring a few rays of light into the mediæval
darkness of Russia, and is for that entitled to grateful recognition.

Had these reforms been associated with a different type of character
they might very well, in spite of their grave incompleteness, dispose us
to grant the title of “Peter the Great.” But if that epithet is to
measure the stature of the whole man we must strenuously refuse it. The
Tsar was energetic, persevering in congenial tasks, even highly endowed
in intellect; but his gifts and, accomplishments were marred by deep,
habitual vices and weaknesses which make it ludicrous to call him a
great man. To this aspect we turn again before we consider the closing
tragedies of his reign.

I have sufficiently introduced the kind of men who were the intimate
friends and coworkers of the Tsar in his youth. Lefort and Gordon both
died in 1699, and new favourites arose. Some of these were, like General
Sheremetieff, fine and loyal servants of proved worth. Some were, like
Romodanovski, nobles of high birth and ability who, in spite of their
insufferable haughtiness and despotism, served the Tsar and the State
well. But a large number were mere adventurers whom a glib tongue, a
large capacity for liquor, or a contemptible obsequiousness commended to
the Tsar, and who then plundered the Empire with utter unscrupulousness.
Of these Menshikoff was the most prominent, most successful, and most
infamous.

Legends grew like mushrooms in the dank soil of Peter’s reign, and
Menshikoff’s origin is, like that of many of his colleagues, very
obscure. It seems certain that, either as a boy or a young man, he sold
meat-pies on the streets of Moscow; and Peter lets us know that he was
an illegitimate child. The wit with which he plied his trade attracted
Lefort, who made a valet of him, and then attracted Peter, who
appropriated him. Peter gave him a license which many historians
interpret in accordance with the morals of the time. He went everywhere
with the Tsar and became rich. In 1706, for no public merit, he became a
Prince; in 1711 he bought the Duchy of Courland. He was the most corrupt
and venal of Peter’s corrupt ministers, and was, on various
occasions, compelled to disgorge a total sum of two and a half million
dollars, yet remained fabulously rich, and as haughty and brutal to his
serfs and servants as he was rich. Count Golovin, in later years, found
a similar type of man, a boot-black, and pushed him at court as a rival
of Menshikoff. He did become Public Prosecutor, but he never dislodged
Menshikoff.

After 1700 this man was Peter’s chief associate and private minister.
The young Tsar, as we saw in the last chapter, built a palace for him in
the foreign quarter, and made it the chief scene of his rollicking.
Menshikoff had two sisters, Marie and Anne, who, with Daria and Barbara
Arsenieff and Anisia Tolstoi, formed the nucleus of the loose young
women of the colony. Peter had, at his mother’s instance, married
Eudoxia Lapukhin, who bore him two children, Alexander (who died young)
and Alexis. She was a typical Russian, of a type as different as
possible from that of the Menshikoffs and Arsenieffs. When his mother,
Natalia, died, he scattered Eudoxia’s relatives and practically
deserted her. He is said to have soaked her brother in spirits of wine
and set fire to him. Some historians have a light way of marking these
stories “incredible,” but very little was incredible in
Peter’s world. His pious sister-in-law, Prascovia, widow of the
Tsar Feodor, one day poured her bottle of brandy over an offending
servant, set fire to it, and beat him with her cane on the sore spot.

To finish for the moment with Eudoxia, Peter’s first and, apparently,
only legitimate wife. In 1698, as we saw, he condemned her to enter a
convent, though there was not the least evidence that she was involved
in the conspiracy. She struggled hard, but a coach bore her away to
Suzdal, where we will resume her strange adventures later.

Lefort had been intimate with a young woman named Anna Mons, the
daughter of a German wineseller (or, according to others, jeweller) of
the colony. Peter, as in other cases, took over his friend’s relict, and
set her up, as chief favourite, in a handsome house. In 1703, however,
the Saxon envoy was drowned near Moscow, and tender letters from Anna
were found in his pocket, it is said. At all events Anna went to prison
for ingratitude, but she found the way out and joined the establishment
of the Prussian envoy: who, when he presumed to ask of Peter some favour
on the ground of his new position, heard her described in terms which
may not be translated.

But the list of Peter’s amours, curious and interesting as it is, would
unduly swell the dimensions of this volume. It is enough to note here
that his mistresses, of an hour or a year, were almost all of the most
common fleshy type: buxom, sensual, and coarse. One must say seriously,
in connection with Peter’s character, that it was as much a matter of
economy as of taste. And this is the simple key to his association with
the woman whom he eventually, legally or illegally, married and made his
Tsarina.

The Empress Catherine shall have a chapter to herself, in which we will
tell her early story. From orphan-maid in a Lutheran pastor’s house at
Marienburg she had, in 1702, passed to the Russian camp and been
successively promoted until she shared the tent of the General, and then
entered the harem of Menshikoff. There Peter had discovered her and
annexed her. She was then eighteen and, by all accounts, not a beauty.
But she had the large hips and full bosom, the round red lips and
cheeks, the rolling sensual eyes, which Peter loved. Candid observers
speak of the eyes as insipid and staring, and describe the nose as
turned up; but she must have had qualities. Probably she was shrewd,
pliant, simple-minded, and rather motherly in his hours of rage and
illness. She settled with him in his humble cottage at St. Petersburg
and washed his shirts. She bore him two sons, and went with him on his
campaigns; and in 1712 he went through the form of marriage with her.

Catherine bore Peter in all eleven children, but the heir to the throne
was Prince Alexis, son of his first wife. Eudoxia had had two sons.
Alexander had died, and Alexis was, when his mother was enclosed in a
convent in 1699, entrusted to the egregious care of Menshikoff for
education. One of Menshikoff’s first tasks was to teach him to drink
brandy, and he acquired a truly Russian capacity for drink. As he
matured, he was similarly educated in license of conduct. He was, like
his father, nervous and unstable, and he became irritable, moody, and
coarse. But there was a singular difference between father and son.
Alexis was very pious. Piety, in Russia, was apt to lodge in a special
part of the brain, and did not exclude drunken and dissolute habits.
Alexis loved Moscow and its churches and rich ritual and legends of the
saints. And, naturally, the spreading discontent at Peter’s “reforms”
and blasphemies found something in the nature of a focus in the court of
Alexis. As he grew up, he intensely disliked his father’s policy.

Peter roughly summoned him to quit Moscow and prepare, by a military
education, for the throne. He quailed and protested that he did not want
to be a soldier. Peter sent him to Dresden, and, hearing that his
lady-friends were too numerous and notorious, married him to Princess
Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel: a gentle, religious, pock-marked young lady,
who could not compete with the livelier dames. She died in childbirth,
and Alexis continued to drink and riot and admire the religious art of
Dresden. Peter again sharply scolded him, and gave him the alternative
of becoming either a soldier (and Tsar) or a monk, Alexis whined that he
would rather be a monk than a rough and bloody soldier; though he
shuddered at the ascetic prospect, and, apparently, intended to escape
at his father’s death on the ground that he had taken the vows
under compulsion. He still dallied.

In 1716, Alexis being now twenty-six years old, the Tsar peremptorily
bade him enter the monastery at Tver or join the army. He replied that
he was coming to Russia, and he begged to be allowed to bring his latest
passion, a young lady named Euphrosyne. After a short delay Peter heard
that Alexis and Euphrosyne had fled, and in a terrible rage he sent his
agents over Europe in search of his son. They traced him and his lady to
an ancient castle in Austria. Alexis had fled to Vienna and hysterically
begged the Emperor’s protection, and the Emperor had sent him to the
obscure castle until he could bring about a reconciliation. When it was
known that Russian spies watched the castle, the Emperor ordered the
Prince to leave behind all his Russian comrades, who encouraged him in
deep drinking, and fly to Naples; and Alexis, taking only one page for
whom he passionately pleaded--it was Euphrosyne, in male
dress--fled to the south. Naples was then under the Empire.

The Russian agents at the court of Vienna demanded the surrender of
Alexis. Dreading the anger of the Tsar, the Emperor sent them on to
Naples, and directed his Viceroy that they _must_ have an interview with
the Prince. The doors were thrown open, and the agents persuaded Alexis,
by lying representations, that Peter would forgive him. Their last
argument was that Euphrosyne would be taken away from him unless he
complied, and the girl--a lusty, thick-lipped peasant-girl, like
Catherine, it seems--tearfully begged her royal lover to go. The jade
had been bribed by Peter’s agents. She was pregnant and was left in
Italy, where the price of her treason was quickly spent. Alexis, full of
the promise that he had only to ask forgiveness and he could retire to
his country-seat and wed his dear Euphrosyne, hurried joyfully to
Moscow.

He arrived on the last day of January (1718), and Moscow, ignorant of
the arts by which he had been entrapped, beheld him with tragic
astonishment. The Tsar was in one of his worst moods. Three days later a
court of clerical and lay dignitaries was formed, and father and son met
before them. Peter showered invectives on his miserable son, and then,
as Alexis flung himself to the ground and asked pardon, promised to
forgive him if he would renounce his right to the throne and betray the
accomplices of his supposed plot. Every man or woman to whom Alexis had
disparaged his father was named, and Peter shuddered with rage. There
had been no conspiracy, Alexis said: nothing but vague murmurs. But the
torture-chambers soon rang with shrieks, and Russian blood streamed
again upon the stones of Moscow.

In his bloodshot fury Peter conceived, or affected, a suspicion that his
first wife, Eudoxia, had been in the plot, and a gang of “questioners”
went to the convent at Suzdal. Fifty nuns were flogged and questioned,
but the innocence of Eudoxia could not be brought under suspicion.
Unhappily a curious page of Eudoxia’s conventual life, which had ended
years before, was brought to light. She had had a lover in the convent.
A noble named Gleboff had befriended her, and from friendship they
passed to intimacy. Her impassioned love-letters of eight years before
were put before the Tsar, and he saw red. Gleboff was horribly tortured
and--wrapped in furs, as it was cold, to preserve his vitality and
torture a little longer--impaled. It is said, but of this we cannot be
sure, that Eudoxia was scourged, naked, by two monks. She was, at all
events, confined more strictly from that time.

Alexis had complied with the conditions, but Peter “the Great” had not
done with his son. The vile Euphrosyne was brought to Moscow, and she
supplied fresh “evidence.” A new court was convoked, and it shrank from
the murder that the Tsar plainly contemplated. Alexis was confronted
with his faithless lover: he was knouted: and he held to his simple
story that he could not be a soldier, and had done no more than
criticise. A third court was set up, and it issued sentence of death;
and a few days later the Prince’s body was exposed to the public gaze,
with a story that God had spared the father the blood of his son by
visiting Alexis with apoplexy. How the Prince really died no man knows,
but few, now or then, would believe the story of natural death. . . . It
was June 26th; and on June 29th, we read, a new ship was launched, and
Peter joined with his usual robustness in the merrymaking.

In 1719 Catherine’s son Peter died, and, on the hereditary principle,
the crown should pass to little Peter, son of the dead Alexis and
Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. The Tsar was worried, but took no effective
steps to settle the very grave matter of the succession. Catherine, too,
was worried, for Peter had a new mistress, a woman of far greater charm
than she, and it was well within the sphere of his ingenuity to secure a
divorce and wed again. But the romance of Peter Mikhailoff has already,
in spite of condensation, run to such length, and the new romance so
largely concerns Catherine, that we may open a new chapter and present
that lady properly to the reader before describing the last phase.



 CHAPTER VIII
 CATHERINE THE LITTLE

THE whims of monarchs have created more romances in the history of women
than the fancy of the novelist has ever invented, and the story of
Peter’s wife and successor is one of the most piquant of these real
adventures. Although in the years of her prosperity she did not shrink
from the mention of her humble origin, the details of her childhood were
never confidently known and are a matter of endless speculation. It is
generally believed that she was the daughter of a Livonian peasant, but
she makes her first certain appearance as maid-of-all-work in the house
of a poor German pastor. Profoundly ignorant, plain of feature, coarse
in taste, this woman became in time the sole mistress of the Russian
Empire.

At the beginning of the Swedish war, in 1702, General Sheremetieff and
the Russian forces besieged Marienburg. The Swedish commander threatened
to blow up the fort rather than surrender, and the inhabitants fled to
the Russian lines. Amongst them, brandishing his credentials (his
Bible), was the Lutheran pastor of the town, with his wife and children
and maid. He was suffered to proceed to Russia, but the maid remained in
the camp. She was then seventeen years old, a lusty and vigorous
peasant-girl such as soldiers covet. The pastor had eked out his slender
income by taking lodgers, and it may or may not be true that Catherine,
or Martha, as she is believed to have been named at the time, was too
intimate with them, and had been married by the pastor for the
protection of her morals. She had no more morals than Peter. In the camp
she now gained rapid promotion. At first she washed the shirts and
shared the bed and board of a non-commissioned officer; then she had the
favour of General Sheremetieff; then the florid taste of Menshikoff was
attracted to her, and she was drafted to his household, and harem, at
Moscow. There Peter saw and appropriated her.

There is, as I said, little reason to seek some secret of her success.
She was of the robust sensual type that Peter preferred. But she must
have been at once shrewd and amiable to have kept his affection as long
as she did. His letters to her show, besides the link of common
coarseness and frank sensuality, a good deal of affection on both sides.
Peter took her to the cottage which he built on the banks of the Neva,
where her second boy was born. It was a small two-roomed cottage, of
rough-hewn trunks of trees, only about fifty feet in frontage and less
in depth. In one of the plain rooms, the walls of which were covered
with canvas, Peter planned and received visitors. In the other Catherine
and he dined, with an occasional intimate friend, and slept. In 1708 he
built a larger and rather finer cottage, more neatly furnished, but, as
in earlier days, he preferred to let Menshikoff keep a palace in which,
with all splendour of gold plate and powdered lackeys and an army of
cooks, he could give his banquets. In the cottage with Catherine he ate
his large coarse meals, drank his tea and gin and brandy, and smoked
great quantities of tobacco. He carried about with him his wooden spoon
and bone-handled knife and fork. Catherine darned his woollen socks and
washed his shirts--fine clean linen was almost the one luxury he
liked--and babies appeared with great regularity. Often when the
tramp of his heavy boots told that he was in a mood of fury, when
servants and friends fled, for he would hit out with fist or cane or
even sword at such times, Catherine took his blood-congested head in her
plump hands and ran her fingers through his thick hair; and he gradually
sank to sleep on her breast.

She was good to him, he felt, and he must provide for her and the
children. But he was now a great monarch, corresponding with all the
courts of Europe and visiting many of them. The idea of marrying her
must be given long consideration. There were Eudoxia’s sons, and there
were Catherine’s sons. It was a puzzling business, and Peter did not
attack a puzzling business when it could wait. In 1706 he seemed to
make up his mind. He took the whole company of “the girls”--Catherine,
and Anisia Tolstoi, and the two Menshikoffs and two Arsenieffs--to
Kieff, summoned Menshikoff, and told him that he must marry Daria
Arsenieff and become respectable. Menshikoff was not the man to be
restricted by vows of marriage, and he obeyed. But Peter did not, as
Catherine expected, follow his friend’s example. He was content to
make a will in which he assigned her and her four children an
imperial legacy of 1,500 dollars!

By 1711 he let it be understood that Catherine was his wife, and he
publicly went through the form of marriage with her. Whether there was a
valid marriage or no is not clear. Catherine is said to have been
married at Marienburg, and Peter’s first marriage does not seem to
have been annulled by the proper authorities. Russia and Europe would
not inquire too closely. Catherine went with him everywhere, except to
Paris, and shared his long rides on horseback and his rough camp-life.
She never attempted to interfere in affairs of State; but she secretly
made large sums of money by getting favours or pardon for offenders. She
remained very friendly with Menshikoff, who taught her the security of
foreign investments.

Peter discovered her trickery, and a cloud came over their relations,
but the question of the succession worried him. The new complication was
that he was intimate with the charming daughter of Prince Kantemir of
Wallachia. The Prince had lost his little principality after Peter’s
defeat on the Pruth, and had come to St. Petersburg to seek
compensation. He knew the relation of the Tsar to his daughter Maria and
expected him to divorce Catherine and wed her. It was a very anxious
time for all. Alexis died, or was executed, in 1718; Catherine’s second
son died in 1719; and in 1722 Maria Kantemir, who was then at Astrakhan,
expected a child. To the relief of Catherine and her party, and the
violent anger of Peter, Maria had a miscarriage and nearly died.

Catherine now got the title of Empress, and in 1724 she was crowned.
Still Peter, although his health gave great concern, evaded the problem
of the succession, but he allowed Catherine a superb coronation. When
she showed him her magnificent robe, which cost 2,000 dollars, he
impatiently pushed it aside, but he let her have a crown made which cost
nearly a million dollars. And within little over six months she, by her
reckless and ungrateful conduct, forfeited whatever right she may have
had and barely escaped with her life.

We remember the giddy Anna Mons, Peter’s mistress for a time in the
foreign settlement at Moscow. Anna’s brother William was one of
Catherine’s chamberlains, and the whole court believed that they were
intimate. At length a letter which is said to have proved it fell into
Peter’s hands. He seems to have felt bitterly the ignominy of publicly
discrowning his new Empress, and for a long time he did nothing, beyond
torturing a witness or two to extract proof. They thought that he had
decided to overlook it, and both Catherine and Mons were at supper with
him one night in November. “What time is it?” he suddenly asked, and
Catherine replied that it was nine. He grimly took her watch, put it on
three hours, and said that, as it was midnight, everybody would go to
bed. Mons was arrested and tortured, and, after a few days, beheaded on
the ground of corrupt practices. His sister Matrena was knouted and sent
to Siberia. Catherine’s personal fortune was taken out of her hands for
administration, and officials were forbidden in future to take any
orders from her.

The iron nerve of the woman in those awful days proves that, in spite of
her origin and ways, she had a steady head and strong character. Peter
took her for a drive, and passed so close to the scaffold that her dress
almost brushed against the body of Mons. She did not flinch. He had the
head put into a glass vessel of spirits of wine and placed in her room.
She took no notice. When he angrily smashed a costly Venetian glass with
his fist, saying that he would so treat her and her relatives, she
scolded him for the waste. He still saw Maria Kantemir daily, and he now
professed to make a discovery which doubled his fury. He had the Greek
doctor who had attended Maria in 1722 “questioned,” and
Catherine was accused of having procured the miscarriage.

What his precise reasons were for not prosecuting and disowning
Catherine we do not know. Some think that he spared her out of
affection: some that, as he still sought a French prince for his and her
daughter, he shrank from the scandal. His mind was in a maudlin state.
Decades of terrific work and constant debauch had brought their
inevitable consequence, yet, with periods of enforced sobriety, he still
maintained his wild ways. The year 1724 had been one of reckless orgies
and much illness, and it was in 1725 that he caused the death of an aged
noble by making him sit for hours, naked, on the frozen Neva because he
would not join their licentious and childish revels. Peter was still the
man who, in 1715, had dissected with his own hands the corpse of his
aunt Apraxin to see if she was really a virgin.

In the first month of 1725 he had a superficial reconciliation with
Catherine. A few weeks later, however, he caught a fatal chill, and he
died within a fortnight. Russia did not mourn. His great and real
services were such as only a later age could appreciate. His rugged,
vicious, cruel personality was known to all, and the cost of his work
had been heavy. One might say that there was in Peter the material of a
great man, but the Romanoff dynasty never produced a great man. The
material, in this one opportunity, was too deeply vitiated to develop.
Peter was an incarnation of the national vices and--except
indolence--the weaknesses he ought to have assailed.

The unsubstantiality of most of his work appears in the sequel. Before
he was dead there began the traditional squabble for power, the familiar
grouping and intriguing of parties. The great majority of the nobles and
clergy were in favour of Peter, the young son of Alexis and Charlotte.
Catherine was too closely identified with the dying Tsar and all his
hated schemes and reforms. But a few great nobles like Prince Menshikoff
and Count Tolstoi knew that their fortune was bound up with that of
Catherine, and they set to work as soon as the Tsar’s illness proved
fatal. The troops were discontented, their pay in arrears and their
limbs weary from the heavy constructive work to which Peter had put
them. Catherine was directed to appeal to them for support and promise
ample pay. The higher clergy who held power under Peter’s new
scheme of Church-government were equally interested in sustaining his
work. The palace was full of whispers and secret movements.

The Council met while Peter lay dying, and the spokesmen of the majority
confidently proposed his grandson for the throne. Tolstoi attacked them,
and proposed Catherine; and after a long and furious debate Catherine
was declared Autocrat of all the Russias. They found her weeping at
Peter’s bedside, and there was a rush to take the oath. Moscow was
mutinous for a time, but the army was won by generous treatment, and the
country followed. The guards were provided with new uniforms and pay,
and it was decreed that in future soldiers must not be employed upon
such work as the making of canals. For the mass of the people, too, a
great relief was afforded by the reduction, by one third, of the
crushing poll-tax which Peter had imposed; and a political amnesty
brought back thousands to their homes from the squalid jails or the
frozen wastes of the north and of Sibera.

Catherine gladly suffered the power she had obtained to pass into the
hands of the nobles who had fought for it. We may, in fact, dismiss her
rule, in its personal aspect, with the remark that she did not rule at
all. She had the wealth and security which she desired, and her one
concern was to retain them through all the quarrels and intrigues of her
court, and, if possible, transmit them to one of her daughters. As
trouble increased, she retired more and more to the privacy of her
luxurious apartments and sought oblivion in intoxication.

A half dozen nobles who had been trained in the school of Peter formed a
small aristocratic clique which governed the country and sustained some
of the late Tsar’s innovations. Of these Menshikoff was, naturally, the
most powerful and most prominent, and the haughtiness of the former
vender of pies rose so high that it is said to have even inspired him
with a hope of attaining the crown. He now acquired wealth without
restriction, and promoted rivals to distant employments or punished
critics as if he were already the Autocrat. The bribing of the army and
the reduction of taxation left the exchequer in a parlous condition.
Troops were disbanded, and superfluous officials removed, but the
treasury still cried for funds, and the corrupt tax-gatherers were
hardly checked.

A good deal of discontent arose, and it found a spokesman in one of the
most powerful prelates, the Archbishop of Novgorod. The prelate had
supported the election of Catherine, but he had expected her to show her
gratitude by reviving the patriarchate and entrusting it to him. Quite
possibly some such promise had been made. It was a world of consummate
knavery. Theodosius, therefore, when he saw that there was no intention
of reviving the patriarchate, discovered, and angrily declared, that it
was little less than a scandal to have a woman at the head of the
Russian Church. Menshikoff made short work of the hypocritical zealot,
whose ways were notorious. It was soon established that Theodosius had
appropriated for domestic use the gold and silver vessels of the altar,
and had melted down such ornaments as could not be put to profane use.
He was disgraced and banished.

A more curious rival of the favourite--a rival even, according to some,
in the affection of the dissipated Empress--was Charles Frederick, Duke
of Holstein, nephew of Charles XII of Sweden. He was an amiable,
mediocre youth who had lost his duchy in the European scramble for
fragments of the broken Swedish kingdom, and he had come to the Russian
court with a pretension to the Swedish throne itself. Catherine’s
protection of him gave great offence in England and embarrassed her
ministers. George I had no wish to see the question of the old Swedish
possessions reopened, and in all the courts of Europe his
representatives fought, and defeated, those of Russia. Indeed in the
spring of 1706 he sent a fleet to Russia, and the admiral insolently
announced that he had come to compel the Russian fleet to keep to its
harbours. The English had heard that Catherine was collecting troops for
some enterprise in the interest of her favourite. She--or her able
minister Ostermann--made a bold reply, and joined the Spanish-Austrian
League which confronted England and her allies. Fortunately, the
struggle did not reach the strain of war, or the loose and shifty
administration of Russia might have suffered.

Charles Frederick remained for the present at the Russian court and was
assiduous in attendance upon the Empress. He was made a member of the
Privy Council of six which took affairs out of the hands of the listless
Catherine, and on May 21st, 1725, he married the Princess Anne. Neither
Anne nor Peter had welcomed his offer, but Catherine now urged the
match.

The other leading members of the Privy Council, or the oligarchy, were
Count Tolstoi and the foreign minister Ostermann. Tolstoi was one of the
envoys of Peter who had enticed Alexis from Naples: a polished and
supple courtier, an astute diplomatist, and an unscrupulous adventurer,
who watched Menshikoff as one sharper watches another. Ostermann was one
of the ablest, and certainly the most conscientious of the group; while
a fourth of Peter’s men, Yaguzhinsky, a man of poor origin who had
attracted the late Tsar’s esteem by his vivacity and his extraordinary
capacity for liquor, was the most bitter and outspoken critic of
Menshikoff. Before Peter had been buried many days they quarrelled
violently, and Yaguzhinsky, who was drunk, went to the tomb of his late
master, during service, and dug with nails and teeth into the lid of the
coffin. He was not admitted to the Privy Council, which led to a fresh
outburst; and he may have felt some justification when it was known that
Menshikoff had invited his fellow-Councillors to a banquet before their
first sitting, and all had got so drunk that business was impossible.

Catherine was only forty-two years old, and a woman of robust
constitution, but in the second year of her reign her unhealthy habits
began to undermine her health and give concern. She, as I said, kept
apart, drinking in seclusion. Only Menshikoff and a few others were
admitted to the rooms where, her stout and somewhat bloated frame
dressed in heavy and tawdry finery, a bunch of orders and little figures
of saints dangling on her breast, she sank deeper into the great
national failing. She drank great quantities of Tokay. Her legs began to
swell. The eternal question of the succession to the throne was
reopened, and the violent quarrels and rivalries ran once more to secret
intrigues.

There was a growing party in favour of the boy Peter, grandson of the
late Tsar. Peter the Great had disliked the son of his rebellious son,
and had disdainfully thrust him out of notice. Peter had, in fact,
issued a pronouncement in which he claimed that the autocrat had the
power to leave his throne to whomsoever he willed. He had, we saw, never
carried out this intention and appointed a successor, and the hereditary
principle was still strong in the mind of Russia; while the nobles and
dignitaries still claimed, in effect, the right to choose between such
candidates as the hereditary principle seemed to designate. It was now a
question whether the throne should pass to the boy Peter or to one of
the young daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, of Catherine and the late Tsar.
The Duchess Anne, a tall and stately brunette, but quiet and yielding,
was not very popular. The choice seemed to lie between the boy Peter and
the Duchess Elizabeth, the younger and sprightlier of Catherine’s
daughters: a very merry and saucy child with pink cheeks and laughing
blue eyes and golden hair, and a forwardness which would very soon lead
her into mischief.

Ostermann, who had charge of Peter’s education and saw that he and
Elizabeth were attached, boldly proposed to marry them (when they came
of age--they were yet children) and thus reconcile the factions. But
Elizabeth was Peter’s aunt, and Menshikoff turned impatiently away from
the learned Teutonic arguments by which Ostermann sought to justify his
plan. Catherine, of course, wanted the crown to pass to one of her
daughters, but the feeling that Peter was the rightful heir grew in
strength. Anonymous letters accused Menshikoff and Catherine of usurping
power. The majority of the courtiers were looking to Peter. There was at
court a powerful body of old-fashioned nobles who had never been
reconciled to the innovations, and these were naturally disposed to
adopt the son of the pious Alexis, who had died for the sacred
traditions of Russia. They might then bring back the late Tsar’s
first wife, Eudoxia, from her convent and let her religious and
conservative influence rule the boy.

Menshikoff at length discovered, and informed Catherine, that the
feeling in favour of Peter was irresistible. He had a daughter, Maria,
and he had resolved to wed this girl to Peter and thus secure his own
position under the new regime. Ostermann, a decent and sober statesman
who sought the good of the country, adhered to this plan, and Catherine
was compelled by her favourite, and virtual master, to agree to it.
Count Tolstoi, however, violently opposed it. He foresaw that Menshikoff
would become more powerful than ever, and he dreaded the reappearance of
Eudoxia, as he had very strongly supported the late Tsar in persecuting
her. The Count led Catherine’s daughters to her room and made a stirring
appeal for them. The young women fell upon their knees and wept, as only
Russians could, imploring their mother’s protection against the
impending dangers. But the failing Empress could only murmur that
Menshikoff had decided, and she was powerless.

Tolstoi turned to the court and tried to form a party. It had little
prestige, though there were always a few in the Russian court who were
willing to gamble on the desperate chances of an outsider, and it in
turn split on the question which of the sisters ought to be adopted. The
struggle became more tense as Catherine’s health sank. In April, 1727,
she passed into a grave condition, and Menshikoff induced her, though
she made a maudlin demonstration in favour of Elizabeth, to sign a will
bequeathing the crown to Peter. This did not put an end to intrigue, as
it was a question whether the nobles would recognise this right of
legacy which had been arbitrarily created by Peter.

Toward the end of April it was thought that the Empress was dying, and
Menshikoff, with her will in his possession, carefully guarded her from
alien influences. At length her hour, apparently, came, and the whole
court was permitted to assemble about her chamber. Through the open door
the glazed eye of the former maid and washer-woman fell upon the
brilliant throng who waited, with intense strain, the opening of another
chapter in the history of the Romanoffs. The Duke of Holstein saw the
last chance of his wife’s succession ebbing away, and he nervously
implored Count Tolstoi to make his way to the dying woman’s side
and plead for Anne. Tolstoi shook his head. Menshikoff watched the play
with rapid pulse, counting the moments before the danger was over. And
suddenly his opponents were delivered into his hands. One of Tolstoi’s
party, Count Devier, was intoxicated, and he began to behave in a way
that certainly desecrated the chamber of death. Quick as thought
Menshikoff had the rooms cleared and Devier arrested. The ever-ready
torture-chamber was opened, and, under the lash of the knout, Devier
betrayed Tolstoi and his associates. Tolstoi and his son went to
Siberia, and Devier to the shores of the Arctic. And on the same day,
May 16th, 1727, Catherine laid down her sceptre and passed away.

Her will--or the document which Menshikoff had composed and she was
supposed to have signed--was read to the dignitaries and notabilities.
The son of Alexis and Charlotte was named Peter II, and there was little
disinclination to take the oath to a grandson of the great monarch. Few,
in the agitation of the hour, saw the possibility of a reaction from a
son of Alexis, and the few who perceived that possibility thought that
they had provided against it. The Privy Council, headed by Menshikoff,
was entrusted with the Regency; and Menshikoff would see that his
relation to the boy-Emperor would soon become more intimate. In the
event of the boy’s death the crown must pass to Anne: in case of
her death to Elizabeth. Never before had there been so clearly conceived
and far-seeing a plan of succession; yet within the next three years
there were to be two revolutions, with the usual terrible consequences,
at that court of greed and passion.



 CHAPTER IX
 ROMANCE UPON ROMANCE

PETER II was a fine, handsome lad of eleven summers, the fruit of the
unhappy union of the miserable Alexis and hardly less miserable
Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. From such a stock Peter the Great had
expected no good. He disliked to think of the boy, and, careful as he
generally was about education, he allowed the child to pass to the hands
of ignorant and incompetent trainers. Catherine, or Menshikoff, who may
have early conceived his plan of the future, altered this state of
things at the death of Peter the Great. The conscientious German
minister Ostermann was charged with the education of the young prince,
and we perceive by his scheme of lessons, which survives, that he was
prepared even for the duties of a monarch.

Unhappily, the best scheme of education depends for its result upon the
co-operation of the pupil, and Peter was a bad pupil. He liked
Ostermann, but he disliked lessons; and the consciousness that he was
now a monarch did not dispose his lively imagination to submit to prosy
toil. There was a strain of nervous instability in nearly the whole of
the Romanoffs at this stage, Peter liked sport and riding and play. His
sister Natalia, two years older than he, was a good playmate; even
better was Aunt Elizabeth, the younger daughter of the late Empress.
Elizabeth was now a very sprightly and pretty young lady of sixteen, the
exact opposite of what a Russian princess ought to be on the old
standards. She shunned books, but took like a boy to riding and hunting
and fencing. Her lively tongue and merry blue eyes attracted young
officers; and she was the daughter of Catherine and Peter in such
matters.

Menshikoff did not like the intimacy and he carried Peter off to one of
his palaces and put trusted servants and the sober Ostermann about him.
He also introduced the young Tsar to the charm of his own domestic
circle, and he presently announced to the Privy Council that Peter had
honoured him by asking the hand of his daughter Maria. The ceremony of
betrothal was, in fact, publicly celebrated. Inconvenient or critical
people were humanely removed by appointments abroad. Even the Duke of
Holstein was induced to return to his native land and take his Duchess
with him; and they were treated very generously in the matter of
provision. Honours and offices were distributed with such generosity as
was consistent with the supreme power and increasing wealth of the
former premier. Members of old noble families, like the Dolgorukis and
Golitzuins, were promoted.

With the aid of Ostermann for foreign affairs Menshikoff ruled the
country advantageously. There was, fortunately, no stress at home or
abroad, for he had no ability as a statesman, but he passed a number of
measures which promoted trade or tranquillity. The Cossacks were more
than pacified by the concessions he made to them. Eudoxia was liberated
from the rigorous and dismal confinement to which Peter the Great had
condemned her; which greatly pleased the orthodox. The tariff was
lowered. The ghastly poles and spikes on which it had been customary to
fix the heads or limbs of criminals were abolished.

But in the world which the Romanoffs had created, or suffered to
develop, the supreme concern was the fortune of the individual. I do not
mean, of course, that this selfishness was unknown at the court of Louis
XV or of George I, but the sequel will show how far Russia lagged behind
even the primitive morality of those elegant courts. There were few who
did not look with green eyes upon the princely fortune of the
adventurer, and there were some who felt it an outrage upon the
nobility. Russia was prosperous; but could a land prosper indefinitely
when the national genius was mocked by foreign innovations and the
sacred traditions of Moscow were scouted? The nobles gave an idealist
complexion to their discontent, and whispers reached the ear of the
growing prince.

Menshikoff was imprudent in meeting Peter’s first movements of
resentment. One day the young Tsar received what appears to have been a
personal payment of nine thousand ducats, and he sent it to his sister
Natalia. Menshikoff met the messenger and took away the money. Peter, he
said, did not yet understand the value of money. Peter sent for him and
gave him, to his amazement, an imperial scolding. He might have
recognised a bit of his old master in the stamping and raging boy, but
he did not take the lesson. Soon afterwards Peter sent to Natalia a fine
service of plate which had been presented to him, and Menshikoff tried
to make her restore it. The First Minister was then compelled to take to
his bed for some weeks. When he recovered, he found that Peter had gone
to the palace at Peterhof, some miles away, and was wildly enjoying
himself with Natalia and Aunt Elizabeth. Ostermann and the Dolgorukis
also were there. Menshikoff, as an offset, demanded the accounts of the
palace, and discharged a servant for some item he found; and the
boy-Tsar, in a fiery interview, told him to mind his own business.

This was in August. Menshikoff, now seriously concerned, thought that
the influence of Ostermann was mischievous, and he got up a violent
quarrel with him and threatened to send him to Siberia. From a loyal
colleague Ostermann became one more enemy of the First Minister, and the
story of his fall ran rapidly. On September 6th Menshikoff went out to
Peterhof to pay respectful homage to the Tsar. Peter not only turned his
back upon him, but drew the attention of his smiling courtiers to the
fact that he did. The minister prepared a festival, and, when the Tsar
scouted his invitation, he nervously begged an interview. The answer was
a troop of soldiers such as he himself had sent to darken many a home,
and he fell to the ground in a swoon.

 [IMAGE: img182.jpg Room of the Tsar Mikhailovitch, Moscow]

A few days later the fallen man appeared before the Privy Council and
received sentence. He was fined, for conspiracy against the throne,
375,000 dollars, stripped of all his honours and offices, and ordered to
retire to the dreary waste of the steppes. But his wife Daria--we
remember Peter the Great forcing him to marry that merry lady--appealed
passionately against the brutal sentence, and he was suffered to retire,
instead, to a beautiful estate he had in the Ukraine. Few wept when, one
morning in September, a long caravan bore Menshikoff and his wife and
daughter out of the life of Russia. But his enemies were not satisfied.
The Dolgorukis, who came to power, trumped up a charge of conspiracy in
the following year, and, on the miserable word of tortured witnesses,
which in Russia was still admitted, banished the broken-hearted
adventurer to the frozen shores of the Arctic. There for two years,
until death set him free and ended one of the great romances of that
stirring period, Menshikoff supported by the labour of his own hands his
devoted wife and the unlucky girl who had thought to become an Empress.

Ostermann remained the most important and most useful statesman, but the
Golitzuins, Dolgorukis, and other families of the old nobility now came
to power and they made an effort to drag Russia back to the ruts from
which Peter the Great had violently shifted it. They were of what came
to be called in the nineteenth century the “Russophile school”:
narrow-minded conservatives who railed at all innovation and foreign
influence, and persuaded themselves that the genius of Russia was
different from that of other European nations. St. Petersburg was to
them the hated symbol of the new order, and they induced Peter to return
to Moscow. He was crowned there on February 25th (1728) with all the
archaic ceremonies of Russian tradition, and they took care to impress
him with the contrast between the comparatively bright and healthy air
of Moscow and the dank climate of the northern metropolis. This court
remained at Moscow, and the departments of State were presently
transferred to it.

To complete the transformation from the ideals of Peter the Great to
those of Alexis the aged Eudoxia was appointed Regent, and a court of
the old type gathered about her. Ostermann was alarmed, and the
reactionaries tried to remove him. Peter, fortunately for Russia, would
not hear of the dismissal of his old director, but he allowed the
conservative nobles to act much as they pleased and he was encouraged by
them to spend his time in hunting and laborious idleness. The fleet was
suffered to rot in harbour, and only the steady effect of such internal
reforms as Peter the Great had introduced kept the country in some
degree of prosperity. The old indolence returned. Since there were now
no costly schemes to be realised, and the favourable turn of foreign
relations brought no war, the taxes were not enforced, and the country
enjoyed a fallacious happiness.

In December Natalia died of consumption. Through her Ostermann had at
times got a warning word to the ear of his pupil, and the levity of the
Tsar now increased. He spent his days with Elizabeth, and the Dolgorukis
feared that what Ostermann had once recommended--the marriage of the
aunt and nephew--would come to pass. As it was their aim, in spite of
all the warnings of Russian history, to marry him to a girl of their own
family, Elizabeth must go; and the frivolity of that precocious lady
gave them ample opportunities. She was scarcely out of her teens, yet
her amours were notorious, and her lovers were not of noble rank. A word
was whispered to Peter, who was a sober and strict-living youth, and
Aunt Elizabeth ceased to be his constant companion.

Austria, Russia’s ally, looked with concern upon this reaction and
indolence, and its representatives joined with Ostermann in pressing
Peter to return to St. Petersburg and attend to his military resources.
A tense, if more or less veiled, struggle for the guidance of the Tsar
set in. For the moment the ambitious Dolgorukis won. They carried Peter
a hundred miles away for a grand and prolonged hunt and series of
entertainments. The entire family surrounded him and kept him for weeks
in a state of febrile exhilaration. When they returned to Moscow, Alexis
Dolgoruki announced that the Tsar was to wed his daughter Catherine, and
the ceremony of betrothal was pompously conducted. The Dolgorukis now
closed round the youthful Tsar, kept their angry rivals away, and began
a premature plunder of the court and treasury as confidently as if such
things had never before left their awful monuments in Russian history.

The wedding was fixed for January 30th, 1730. Peter would then be only
fourteen years old, but the Dolgorukis were anxious. Already the Tsar
was peevish and moody, and he gave at times alarmingly sharp replies.
One day as the favoured family gathered round him and amused him with a
game of forfeits, it fell to him, as a forfeit, to kiss his betrothed.
To their consternation he walked out of the room. About the middle of
the month a worse cloud than ever came over their hour of sunshine.
Peter fell ill and--it was whispered among the pale-faced
family--the malady was the dreaded small-pox. Frantic conferences
were held, and some of the family, in their sordid greed and
selfishness, actually proposed to wed the semi-conscious boy and put the
girl abed with him. But Ostermann guarded the chamber, and on January
30th, the day appointed for the wedding, Peter II ended his brief reign.

The succession to the throne was now so open that Moscow teemed with
melodramatic conspiracies. The young bloods of the Dolgoruki party are
said to have forged a will in which Peter left the crown to his
betrothed, but the older men ridiculed the proposal, and the document
does not seem to have been produced. On the other hand, the physician of
the Tsarevna Elizabeth, a born conspirator, roused that young lady from
her sleep and urged her to seize the throne. Elizabeth fluttered over
the romantic proposal, then turned over in bed and deferred it to the
morrow. On the morrow it was too late, for the Privy Council had held
an all-night sitting and come to a singular decision.

Prince Demetrius Golitzuin, one of the older nobles who had never
enjoyed what he regarded as his full share of wealth and power, felt
that it was his turn to make a monarch and enjoy the reward. He decked
his plan with a plausible air of reform. This recent concentration of
power in the hands of an autocrat was the root of all evil, since one
monarch usually meant one favourite. Let them choose a ruler who would
promise in advance--promise on paper--to resign the power to the Privy
Council. He drew up a scheme in which the future sovereign pledged
himself or herself to take no important action--to declare war, or levy
taxes, or punish a noble, or marry, and so on--without their consent.
What candidate would be likely to sign and respect such a promise?
Elizabeth could not be relied upon; in fact, Golitzuin, a proud and
arrogant noble of the old school, detested Peter the Great and regarded
his marriage as void and his daughters as illegitimate. But Peter’s
elder brother, the weak-minded Ivan V, had left three daughters, and the
second of these, Anne, Duchess of Courland, would, it was thought, agree
to almost any conditions if she were offered the crown.

Anne, who was then thirty-seven years old, had had a dull and vexatious
life. Peter had made her and her mother, Prascovia, move to St.
Petersburg, and he had compelled Anne, in her eighteenth year, to marry
the Duke of Courland, for political reasons. The Duke, however, had
found Russian hospitality so overpowering that he had died on the way
home, and the young princess, childless and isolated, had been compelled
to continue the journey and settle at Mitau, the capital of the Duchy.
To control her purse and administer her affairs Peter had sent Count
Besthuzeff, and he laughed heartily when he heard that Anne had made a
lover of him. Presently there came along the familiar type of handsome
and unscrupulous adventurer. The grandson of a groom of an earlier Duke,
named Biren, had a sister in a modest office at court. She was, however,
also a mistress of the Count, and she got a place for her brother. Biren
was clever and ambitious, and it was not long before he supplanted
Besthuzeff in the affection of the Duchess and got him dismissed. Biren
married after a time, and it is claimed that Anne’s very intimate
relations to him after his marriage were purely Platonic. In any case he
remained master of her court, and he would no doubt be consulted on the
strange new problem that confronted her. She had costly tastes and
little money, and glittering Moscow suddenly and unexpectedly rose on
her horizon.

The Privy Councillors had decided that Anne was the most likely of the
surviving Romanoffs--Peter was the last male of the family--to
accept the crown at a reduced price. They had sent a deputation to
Mitau, and a courier presently came hack with the news that she had
signed the conditions. Yaguzhinsky, the drunken and turbulent general
who had often given trouble, had tried a little intrigue of his own. He
had sent a disguised messenger to Mitau to warn Anne, but his messenger
had been caught by Golitzuin’s watchful servants on the return
journey. A general meeting of the great officials and nobles was called,
and the Privy Councillors announced to them that Anne had accepted, and
resigned all power to the Council. It is quaint to read, in letters of
the time, that the once democratic Russians now trembled with anger at
this surrender of the sacred autocracy. The announcement was received in
ominous silence. Golitzuin turned fiercely upon Yaguzhinsky and forced
him to avow his plot; and the general and his associates were arrested
and disgraced. The malcontents were cowed, and Anne came to Moscow.

There can be very little doubt that Anne, who was intelligent, perfectly
understood the situation and was ready, on any pretext, to disavow her
oath. Although Golitzuin set a close guard of servants and soldiers
about her, she soon learned that there was a powerful party in
opposition to the Privy Council, and she entered into correspondence
with it. Count Biren’s baby was her godchild, and she insisted
that it be brought to her chamber every morning to be fondled. A baby
and nurse could do little harm, the sentries thought; but there were
notes from the conspirators pinned underneath the baby’s bib.
Letters were smuggled in presents to the sovereign. Another of the older
nobles, Prince Tcherkasky, was aiming at power, on the approved lines of
Russian tradition (the invariable ghastly ends of which no one seemed to
study), and was organising the conspiracy.

On the morning of May 8th, ten weeks after Anne’s arrival, about
eight hundred of the nobles and gentry assembled in the courtyard of the
Kreml, and, with a select body of officers of the guard, trooped to
Anne’s apartments and asked a hearing. The comedy was gravely
enacted. Anne, surrounded by her court, graciously received the
petitioners, and heard with astonishment that there was dissatisfaction
at her surrender of the autocracy. The Privy Councillors were summoned,
and Tcherkasky and Dolgoruki fought for the lead. Anne hesitated, but
her elder sister, the Duchess of Mecklenburg, turned the scale against
the Privy Council. She would reconsider her act. In the afternoon the
parties returned, and Anne turned severely upon the Councillors.
“Were not those articles you submitted to me framed with the
consent of my subjects?” she asked. It was boisterously affirmed
by the crowd that they were not. “Then you lied,” she said
to the great nobles; and the autocracy was restored, and the roll of
drums and roar of guns and clangour of bells announced with what joy
Moscow took the yoke on its shoulders once more.

For a time it seemed as if the new ruler was too humane to exact the
usual penalties. The Privy Council was abolished, but the Senate was
reorganised and the Golitzuins and Dolgorukis were, to their surprise,
included in the new body. Their wives were welcomed at court, their
relatives promoted. But either Anne awaited the advice of Biren, who had
remained at Mitau for a time, or she prudently ascertained her strength.
In April a flash of the brutal Romanoff temper lit Moscow once more.
Alexis Dolgoruki and his family were arrested and convicted of causing
the death of the late Tsar. The aged father went to Siberia, the younger
men were knouted and exiled, and the young Catherine, the betrothed of
Peter II, was, with a refinement of cruelty, sent to the very spot in
the frozen north where Menshikoff’s daughter, the earlier aspirant to
the crown, had lamented her bitter disappointment. The great proud
family was shattered to atoms.

And the power that their fellow-nobles had snatched from them now passed
mainly to foreigners. Biren established himself in the palace, close
to Anne’s apartments, and became the real autocrat. Anne was too
intelligent to part with the old and experienced ministers. Indeed an
inner cabinet, consisting of Ostermann, Tcherkasky, and Golovkin, was
formed, and the affairs of the State were conscientiously administered.
But the bulk of the lucrative offices fell to Germans and Courlanders.
Russians grumbled, and were snubbed. The fiery Yaguzhinsky was
dissatisfied with his promotion and, in his cups, he spoke freely about
the foreigners. One day, at table, he insulted and drew his sword upon
Biren. He was appointed minister at Berlin. Other nobles were punished
for criticising, and Count Biren settled down to his reign.

The external fortune of the country may be briefly sketched. In the
eternal rise and fall of nations Poland had now sunk to almost its
lowest depth; Sweden was sinking; France was at its zenith, and was in
deadly antagonism to Austria; Prussia was watching and preparing
astutely, and snatching every advantage it could from the quarrels of
its neighbours. The obvious policy of Russia was to remain on good terms
with the nearer of the great Powers, Austria, and it was just as
obviously the policy of France to detach Russia and weaken Austria. The
diplomatic battle rose to a furious pitch over the succession to the
throne of Poland, which Augustus II would soon quit. He naturally wished
to leave the crown to his son, and the French king wished to secure it
for his Polish father-in-law, Lesczynski. Both sides offered bribes to
Biren, and he looked lovingly at the magnificent French offer of half a
million ducats and the Duchy of Courland, but so violent and dangerous a
change of Russian policy was not to be contemplated.

Augustus died, and the Poles were induced to accept Lesczynski. Poland
was now “the sick man of Europe,” as every aspirant to its throne was
ready to barter away some portion of its territory to the greedy Powers.
But Russia would not endure the French candidate, and in the summer of
1733 a Russian army invaded and subdued the Poles. The French retorted,
in the manner of the time, by spurring the Swedes and the Turks to draw
off the Russians, and a long war (1736-1739) with Turkey followed. Azoff
was retaken, and the Russian generals had a hope of annexing the
northern coast of the Black Sea. Anne, however, watched the progress of
the long and costly operations with feminine emotion, and the withdrawal
of Austria from the war gave her and her Council an opportunity to end
it. It had cost the lives of a hundred thousand men and had strained the
Russian treasury; and all that the grumbling country gained was the city
of Azoff and a small area of the surrounding region. It should be added,
however, that, cumbrous as the Russian army was, its prestige rose in
the mind of Europe. Its German commanders and engineers counted for
something.

To the people at large, when the last fireworks had been discharged, the
burden of the war was a new grievance. Anne was not without shrewdness.
She contrived to wring from the impoverished people even the arrears of
taxes, which the frivolity of the late administration had allowed to
accumulate, without ever confronting a serious threat to her rule. But
her careful and generally intelligent government was guilty of one
extravagance which further angered the people. She loved pomp and
display, and she gradually impressed upon her court and aristocracy a
standard of living, especially of dressing, which threatened many with
ruin.

The court returned in 1732 to St. Petersburg, and Biren and she
attempted to give it the elegance and splendour of the first courts of
Europe. Neither had at first much refinement of taste, and foreign
visitors described with amused disdain the veneer of display on the
lingering barbarism of Russia. New uniforms of the most gaudy character
were supplied to the guard and the servants of the court. The nobles
were compelled to spend what seemed to Russians colossal sums in
bringing themselves up to the new standard, and a bewigged and
bepowdered crowd, in dazzling blue or green or pink silks and satins,
replaced the sober-clad boyars of earlier years. Banquets and balls
followed each other in rapid succession, and new dresses must adorn each
occasion; while it is said that the demand for the services of the
elaborate hair-dressers was such that ladies had at times to have their
hair dressed two or three days in advance and carefully preserve the
structure until the evening of the ball.

In her later years Anne, perhaps taught by the pungent criticisms of
foreign guests, developed a sober taste. She was a very tall woman, of
large and not ungraceful build, with grave dark blue eyes and black
hair. In her later years she exchanged her bright blues and greens for
gold brocade or brown silk, her diamonds for pearls; and her officers
had black and yellow liveries, embroidered with silver braid. She did
much to raise the taste of Russia. Although champagne was now introduced
into Russia, she frowned upon the ancient daily habit of intoxication.
Only on one day of the year--the anniversary of her coronation--did she
tolerate heavy drinking. She introduced also a certain lightness and
elegance into open-air feasts, which had in Peter’s day been orgies of
drink and roughness, and she insisted on better manners at table. It was
not long since, at a Russian dinner, one plate had had to serve a guest
through the long and varied series of courses--the punctilious man
wiped his plate with his finger or napkin, or poured the gravy on to the
floor--and a servant had torn scraps of linen or calico off a roll
for the use of those who desired napkins. Into the state of such rooms
when the doors were locked for many hours, as they often were, the
polite modern must not inquire too closely. A good deal of this
grossness lingered in Russia, and Anne set her face against it.

She--the earlier lover of Besthuzeff and Biren--was not less warmly
opposed to laxity of morals. Moderate gambling she herself introduced
and encouraged, but the young folk whom she liked to have about her had
to be careful. When Elizabeth did not reform her free ways, after a few
lovers had been sent to Siberia, she was threatened with a convent.
Anne’s favourite was a niece. Princess Anne of Mecklenburg, an insipid,
good-natured girl whom she was preparing for the throne. The Saxon
envoy, Count Lynar, was discovered in too close a relation to this young
lady, and was sent back to Saxony; whence we shall find him return as
soon as the Tsarina is dead and his lover is on the throne.

In other respects the character of Anne was at the lowest Romanoff
level. She not only delighted in the dwarfs and buffoons, and the rough
knock-about comedies, which had always been popular at the court, but
she found pleasure in refinements of cruelty which Peter would have
thought unchivalrous. She would rock with laughter when her dwarfs got
to bloody noses in their cock-fights, and she sank to the depth of
compelling noble men and women who incurred her anger to enter these
vulgar troops and provide the most puerile amusement. A noble of merit
was condemned to this disgraceful service because Anne hated his wife;
another because he joined the Roman Church. But the most curious and
brutal of all her whims was her treatment of a noble of the great
Golitzuin family.

The man had travelled in Italy and married a Roman Catholic. He was
forty years old and of high birth, yet he was compelled to enter the
company of Anne’s pages and buffoons. When his wife at length
died, Anne said that she would choose a second for him, and she selected
a coarse and ugly Kalmuck woman from the uncivilised fringe of her
Empire. The wedding must be not merely public, but of a nature to
attract the attention of the whole of Russia to his disgrace, and
specimens of all the backward peoples of the Empire were summoned to it.
A long procession of Finns, Lapps, Samoyedes, etc., riding in carts
drawn by pigs or reindeer or other unusual animals, preceded the
miserable groom and his bride, who rode on an elephant, to the church.
All St. Petersburg turned out to see it. In the evening a large banquet
was served to the guests, and the wedded pair then went to the house
which had been made for them. It was the month of February, and a house
had been cut out of solid ice. Cannons of ice exploded at the door, all
the furniture was of ice, and the unfortunate noble and his hideous
companion were enclosed for the night in a room, and upon a bed, of
naked ice. This was in the very year of the Empress’s death.

Anne was scarcely less to blame for the conduct of her favourite. While
Russia groaned under her taxes, his wealth grew to a colossal fortune.
His wife’s diamonds alone were valued at three million rubles. His
stables, his plate, his palaces, were amongst the most superb in Europe.
This wealth was notoriously amassed by corruption and protected by a
system of spies and bullies. In his Duchy of Courland, which he obtained
in 1737 by bribing the electors, his name spelt terror to the poor folk
from whom he had sprung. In Russia itself he ruled by the knout and the
executioner. In 1739 he felt that the Dolgorukis were not quite beyond
the power of making mischief, if the Empress died, and he dragged them
from their exiles and had a fresh trial. One was broken on the wheel,
two were beheaded, and others were imprisoned for life. In the following
year he was insulted in the Council by a certain Voluinsky, whom he had
adopted, but who had turned against him. The man must be broken or he
would himself leave the country, he told the Empress. She sadly
consented, and the man was taken to a scaffold which bore instruments so
horrible that his robust nerve gave way. At the last moment the Empress
benevolently commuted his sentence; he merely lost his right hand and
his head. His companions lost their heads or their tongues, or joined
the melancholy colony in Siberia.

In the summer of 1740 the Princess Anne, who had married Prince Anthony
of Brunswick-Bevern, bore a son, and, as Anne’s health failed, the
feverish dispute about the succession reopened. It was understood that
this infant was to be nominated Tsar, and the natural course would be to
make his parents the Regents. Biren, however, took care to have himself
nominated for the Regency, and he pressed the Empress, whose end was in
sight, to endorse the arrangement. She refused for some days, but on
October 26th she signed the document, and two days later she died.

Another, and still stranger romance, was now to be added to the weird
chronicle of the court of the Romanoffs. Anne of Mecklenburg was the
daughter of the late Empress’s elder sister, who had, we saw, been a
daughter of Peter the Great’s elder brother. She seems to have been very
unlike the other members of the family, though her mother had been a
quiet and temperate princess. Anne herself was a blonde, good-natured
nonentity; a pawn in the game played by her elders. Prince Anthony, who
had even less intelligence and character than she, had been brought
young from Austria, and trained for his marital and royal duties under
the eye of the late Empress. His wife disdained him, and Biren, seeing
her dislike before they were married, suggested that she should marry
instead his fifteen-year-old son. This proposal she rejected even more
vehemently, and in the summer of 1739 she had coldly given her hand to
Anthony.

Biren perceived the delicacy of his position, and he tried, by
concessions to the troops and a reduction of the extravagance which the
late Empress had imposed, to conciliate the country. But from the first
day of his Regency a sullen murmur rose about him and gathered volume.
Prince Anthony was the first to rebel. It was, he said, infamous to
exclude him from the Regency when his son was Tsar; but when Biren
brought him before an assembly of the nobles he saw the shadow of the
scaffold and broke into hysterical tears. He was relieved of his
appointments and ordered to confine himself to his wife’s apartments.
Anne herself then murmured, and Biren threatened to retain the babe, and
send her and her husband to Mecklenburg.

In the group of dignitaries was a German military engineer, Münnich,
who had never yet gambled in the intrigue of making a ruler of the
Russian Empire, and chance and spite now offered him an opportunity. On
November 19th, a few weeks after the death of the late Empress, he had
some business at the chamber of the Princess Anne, and the young mother
tearfully confided to him her humiliations. She and her husband, she
sobbed, would take their child and quit Russia for ever. Münnich was
sympathetic: as she may have been forewarned. Biren had not given him
the post of Commander in Chief, which he coveted. He told Anne to
confide entirely in him, and went off to dine, jovially enough, with
Biren. He was back afterwards at Anne’s chamber, telling her to be
ready for action at three the next morning; and, in order the better to
mask his intrigue, he returned to sup and crack a bottle with the
Regent.

Münnich was Lieutenant-Colonel of the Guard, and at two in the morning
he told his plan to the awakened officers, and they led a picked body of
troops to the Summer Palace. Bluffing the guards with a statement that
he was conducting the Princess Anne to see Biren on some important
business, he took his men to the room in which Biren and his wife slept.
One glance at the massed uniforms behind the Colonel told the amazing
adventurer that his hour had come. He fought like a madman, but was
overpowered and carried off in a quilt. Before the day broke his
brothers and reliable supporters were under arrest, and St. Petersburg
awoke to find that another revolution had been successfully accomplished
at the palace. The hated Courlander was stripped of all his possessions,
and he took that dreary route to Siberia that had been trodden by
thousands of his victims.

But this last romance--of this particular series--had only begun with
the pretty adventure of the German engineer. Münnich inherited Biren’s
vanity and corruption, as well as his power and wealth, but not his
astuteness. In two months he is said to have heaped up a fortune hardly
less than that of Biren, and it was at the grave cost of the State. The
War of the Austrian Succession had opened, and Frederick of Prussia
heavily bribed Münnich to put Russia on his side instead of that of
Maria Theresa. This was too much for the sagacious Ostermann, who
secured a redistribution of power and responsibility. His conceited
fellow-countryman, overestimating the stupidity of the Regents, tendered
his resignation, and it was accepted. Ostermann now resumed the control
of foreign policy, but such matters concern us little here. It is enough
to say that Sweden was spurred by France to a new attack upon Russia,
and was defeated.

In the meantime the new romance was rapidly developing in the court. A
young German woman named Julia Mengden secured, not merely the favours,
but the passionate attachment, of the Regent Anne, and the court was
filled afresh with disgust. Anne, an idle and insipid creature, would
spend almost the whole day playing cards with Julia. She was often too
lazy or too listless to dress, and courtiers found her scantily draped
in Julia’s room at all hours. Other Mengdens were attracted from
the depths of Germany. A new brood of thick-tongued foreigners swarmed
about the court.

Then Count Lynar, the Saxon envoy whom the late Empress had thought it
prudent to remove, returned to St. Petersburg, and to the palace. Julia
married him, but there seems no room for doubt that she was chiefly
concerned to mask her royal friend’s _liaison_ with the Count. Anne had
a second legitimate child, but within a few weeks Julia was holding her
door while Lynar was within. As Anne had no redeeming charm or grace of
character, the court looked on with disdain. Lynar, it was feared, would
succeed to the place of Münnich, Biren, and Menshikoff, and few had a
word for Anne. To her court she presented always a dull and bored look,
and her husband she openly despised.

In the circumstances a fresh intrigue was almost inevitable, and the
only other surviving Romanoff was the Princess Elizabeth. There was,
moreover, a French envoy at St. Petersburg who had the romantic
imagination in its liveliest form, and who concluded that Elizabeth was
precisely the ruler who would best suit the interests of his country. To
obtain power she would, he thought, desert St. Petersburg for Moscow and
surrender the Baltic provinces to the Swedes. He got into touch with
Elizabeth and proposed that she should do this, if he arranged,
simultaneously, a rising in St. Petersburg and an invasion by the
Swedes. Elizabeth refused to yield territory, but she continued the
negotiations. In December Anne detected her correspondence and warmly
scolded her, but the quarrel ended in embraces. That was on December
4th; and in the early morning of December 6th, as Anne slept with her
beloved Julia, a troop of grenadiers, with Princess Elizabeth at their
head, entered the room and made an end of the reign of little Ivan VI
and the Regency of his parents. How that was done belongs to the romance
of the romantic Empress Elizabeth.



 CHAPTER X
 THE GAY AND PIOUS ELIZABETH

ELIZABETH has already entered so frequently, and so picturesquely, into
the story that little further introduction is necessary. She was the
younger of the two surviving daughters of Peter the Great and Catherine,
and she inherited the independent temper of her father. Her pretty,
merry figure was one of the most piquant of the court, and she had
hardly attained a precocious puberty when it became necessary to watch
her movements. She had, during the last three reigns, regarded both the
court and its rulers with disdain. For the belated prudery of the
Empress Anne she had no respect; it was the awful threat of confining
her hot blood in a convent which had for a time curbed her public
behaviour. For the baby-Emperor and his foolish parents she felt
contempt, and she was prepared at any time to see the wheel of fortune
turn toward her.

It was, as I said, the enterprising Marquis de la Chétardie who opened
for her a plausible path to the throne. I would not stress her virtue in
refusing to promise to yield Russian territory to Sweden. She knew, and
the Marquis ought to have known, that such a concession would have cost
her the throne. But she continued to negotiate with him, and her French
physician, Lestocq, assisted in the plot. Count Ostermann, the wise old
German councillor who survived all revolutions at court, suspected her,
and she had to use strategy. Chétardie took a villa up the Neva, and
Elizabeth was fond of boating. She contrived to meet him casually and
discuss the plot. She had, further, a few confidants at court, who were
ready to speculate on the chances of a revolution, and she had,
especially, the affection of the guards. Like her mother she was amiable
with the soldiers. She held their children at the font and inquired
genially about their families. Ostermann, we saw, detected the
conspiracy, and Anne was directed to charge her with treasonable
relations with France and Sweden, the enemies of Russia. The interview
ended in sisterly tears and embraces, and the conspirators got speedily
to work.

Ostermann, seeing the weakness of Anne, ordered the guard to be ready to
leave for the frontier within twenty-four hours. It was probable, he
mendaciously said, that Sweden was about to re-open the war. He had
recently quarrelled with Elizabeth, and had no mind to see her Empress.
This was on December 5th, the day after her interview with Anne. That
night at ten the conspirators met to decide upon immediate action.
Lestocq, the doctor, went out into the snow to see that all lights were
out at Ostermann’s mansion and the palace. They were as feeble a
group of conspirators as ever engineered a revolution in Russia, and
Elizabeth wavered between dread of a convent and eagerness for the
throne. The most active and eloquent of them was the French physician.
Then there were Vorontsoff, her chamberlain; Schwartz, her music-master;
the brothers Shuvaloff, gentlemen of her household; and Alexis
Razumovsky, her lover at the time, of whom we will see more. They raised
Elizabeth’s courage to the required pitch, and Lestocq stealthily
introduced twenty grenadiers of the guard who professed that they
were--for a consideration--ready to die for her. Elizabeth
donned a cuirass under her cloak and slung a crucifix at her breast, and
then, after a long and fervent prayer, committed her fortunes to
Providence and the modest skill of her friends. Her lover was left to
guard the house.

At two in the morning the party passed swiftly through the frozen
streets to the Preobrajensky barracks. A small crowd of about two
hundred soldiers gathered round Elizabeth and listened to her appeal to
support her, the daughter of Peter, and exterminate the foreigners. They
would cut them to pieces, they assured her; and she had to explain that
she would have no bloodshed. Other soldiers joined them, and presently a
troop of four hundred marched with her and her supporters to the palace.
It was the tamest revolution Russia had yet seen. Ostermann, Golovkin,
and the other leading ministers were pinned into their mansions; the few
loyal guards at the palace were thrust aside; and, as I said, Anne and
Julia awoke to find Elizabeth in their bedroom at the head of a crowd of
grenadiers.

Anne was not of the stuff of heroines. She meekly begged Elizabeth to
spare her family and not take away her dear Julia, and she and her
imperial baby were put upon the sledge and driven to Elizabeth’s house.
The blaze of fires in the courtyards and noise of soldiers soon roused
the city, and courtiers and soldiers rushed out to study the situation.
It is said of Lacy, the Irish commander, that, when a friend asked him
which party he stood for, he promptly replied: “For the party that is in
power.” Few were so candid in speech, but all behaved alike. They rushed
to take the new oath of allegiance, and the Empress Elizabeth
inaugurated her reign.

Elizabeth insisted that there should be no bloodshed, but what happened
may give the true measure of such advance as this indicated. Little Ivan
and his parents must, she said, receive a pension and go back to
Germany. Anne and Anthony, glad to escape so lightly, started for the
frontier, but a courier reached them before they had left Russia, and
they were imprisoned at Riga. After a time they were transferred, still
prisoners, to Oranienbaum. Whether Elizabeth was struggling with her own
glimmer of a conscience or with less humane counsellors it would be
difficult to say. She consulted everybody. Was her life really in
danger, or might she follow her impulse of humanity and let the
weak-minded couple depart? Humanity was a new and rare thing in Russia.

In 1744, when Anne expected a third baby, the deposed couple were, at
the instigation of Frederick of Prussia, confined in the fortress of
Schlüsselburg, and four months later they were put upon sledges and
driven north. They were to be imprisoned in a monastery on an island
near Archangel. When, however, they reached Kholnagory, on the coast,
the state of the ice would not allow the guards to take them to the
island and they were left in the village. There, on the bleak shore of
the Arctic, father and mother and five children--Anne added two to the
family before she sickened and died three years later--lived and slept
together in a common Russian hut. The children grew up feebler in mind
and body even than their parents, but Russia would have it that the
pale-faced Ivan was still the nucleus of a conspiracy. He was in 1756,
in his thirteenth year, removed to a remote dungeon, to await his murder
under the reign of Catherine. Prince Anthony was weak-minded enough to
survive the horrors for thirty years, and his children were at length
released by Catherine and sent to live on a small pension in Denmark.

The “clemency” of Elizabeth--of which the decrees of the time speak--was
equally exhibited toward the surviving servants of her father and her
predecessor. Away with the Germans, was the cry; and a few distinguished
Russians were included in the batch of prisoners who now looked forward
to the customary reprisals. Old Ostermann, gouty and stoical, had fought
Elizabeth, and he knew that his forty years of sound service would count
for nothing. He was to be broken on the wheel. Münnich was to lose his
hands and his head; Golovkin his head; and so on. A vast crowd gathered
in the square on January 29th to see the “traitors” butchered. At the
last moment an order of the Empress spared Ostermann the wheel and
changed the sentence to decapitation. The old man moved toward the
block, and a new order changed the punishment to exile. He quietly asked
for his coat, and was packed off to the bleak northern region to which
he had once helped to send Menshikoff. The crowd murmured when fresh
orders from the Empress cheated them of the sight of blood. Münnich was
sent to the spot--the very house--in Siberia to which he had sent Biren,
who was summoned back to life. They met on the way, in Siberia, and
bowed; and the great soldier settled down to rearing chickens and
growing vegetables. The others were scattered over the bleak north.
There had been no torture of witnesses--though much suborning of
witnesses--and no bloodshed. Russia was improving.

While the goats were scattered, the sheep were gathered on the right
hand. Vorontsoff became a leading minister, and his humble colleagues
strutted also in gold lace and silks. Lestocq, first physician of the
new court, was so richly rewarded with gold and favour that he imagined
himself the prime spirit of the new regime, and will presently come to
grief. The Marquis de la Chétardie became a saviour of Russia (which he
would like to ruin in the interest of France, and indeed expected to be
at least gravely weakened under the rule of Elizabeth), and soldiers
kissed his hand. The guards, heavily rewarded, put on insufferable airs,
and wandered insolently about the palace as if they were part owners of
it. The state of the court was chaotic, and foreign envoys sent word
home that Russia would sink back into barbarism.

The strange fortune of Alexis Razumovsky deserves a paragraph, since it
cannot have a chapter. He was a tall, handsome Cossack, with fine black
eyes and eyebrows and a rich black beard; a man in his thirty-fourth
year when wealth and power were thus thrust upon him. Twenty years
earlier he had been a guardian of his father’s sheep and a
chorister in the church of the little Cossack village where his mother
kept an inn. An imperial courier, passing through, had heard him sing,
and had sent him to St. Petersburg to be trained and then got him a
place in the choir of the imperial palace at Moscow. He was then
twenty-two, and Elizabeth saw and appropriated him for her household.
The Marquis de la Chétardie says that one of her maids first
appropriated the handsome Cossack and Elizabeth got the news from her.
To tell all the _legends_ of the Russian court would need many
volumes, and would offend the taste of our polite age, but no one
seriously questions that Razumovsky took the place of Elizabeth’s
latest lover whom Anne had sent to Siberia.

At Elizabeth’s accession he was made a Count and a Field Marshal. He was
never spoiled by prosperity--“you may make me a Field Marshal,” he said
genially, “but you’ll never make me a soldier”--and never interfered in
politics. He took his great wealth pleasantly and generously, and drank
royally. His brothers and relatives were--not by him, but by the
Empress--similarly enriched, and even his old Cossack mother was brought
from her inn, richly dressed, and presented at court. There was a story
that the bewildered woman took her own reflection in the glass for the
Empress and nervously curtsied to it; which would not flatter Elizabeth,
as she was still one of the most handsome women of Russia.

Whether Elizabeth ever married Razumovsky cannot be exactly determined.
It is generally accepted that she privately, at the instigation of her
confessor, married him in the fall of 1742. Elizabeth openly doted on
him and would always have him with her. He kept his even temper when, in
her later years, she returned to her early license, and he was present
at her death; after which, it is said, he was seen to burn a casket of
papers which _may_ have included a wedding-certificate.

A still greater favourite, in a different way, was Elizabeth’s nephew,
Karl Peter Ulrich, son of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and Anne of
Mecklenburg, the elder daughter of Catherine and Peter. His mother had
died of consumption a few months after his birth at Kiel, in 1728, and
her sickly taint was on the boy. He was mean in body, intellect and
character, and, as his father had died when he was eleven, his education
had been rough. Elizabeth sent for him, gave him excellent tutors, and
completely spoiled what bit of manliness he had. He was made a Grand
Duke and heir to the throne--being the last male with any Romanoff
blood--and, as he disliked the Empress’s feminine circle, he surrounded
himself with Germans, affected a contempt for Russia, and laughed at his
aunt’s amours.

 [IMAGE: img214.jpg Paul the First]

But Elizabeth was very far from being a fool. She adopted Peter in order
to keep the crown in her father’s family, making, out of dynastic
feeling, a mistake which wise men like Marcus Aurelius had made. For the
government of the country she chose her men well, as a rule, and she
tried to put a stop to the disgraceful rivalry which had so often rent
the court. At first her chief ministers were her Grand Chamberlain,
Prince Tcherkasky, a corrupt old noble of the traditional school, and
his son-in-law Trubetskoi. But she saw the greater merit of Michael
Bestuzheff, the Grand Marshal of her household, a grave and learned man,
and his able younger brother, Alexis, who was to become her chief
minister.

Elizabeth herself was lazy. She let documents wait weeks for her
signature and at ordinary times paid little attention to affairs. Her
more resolute admirers say that she was so conscientious that she took
weeks to consider a matter. She was, in point of fact, a thorough
patriot, eager to maintain the work of her father; but most of her time
was spent in the preservation of her health and beauty and the
satisfaction of her insatiable thirst for pleasure. Her toilet took
several hours every day, and it did not generally begin before midday,
as she was apt to sit up with her intimate friends until the early hours
of the morning. It is said that she drank heavily in her later years,
but that is disputed. Her chief passion was for dress and entertainment.
In a palace-fire she lost four thousand costly dresses, yet there were
fifteen thousand in her wardrobe when she died. She had a large and
opulent figure--a little too opulent as time went on--a face
with few rivals in Russia, charming blue eyes and dark-golden hair.

One of her characteristics was a love of dressing as a soldier or
sailor. She had good warrant for this in the example of her parents;
and, to say the truth, she thought that no lady of her court could match
her in male dress. So fancy-balls became very frequent, and Elizabeth,
who was still fond of dancing and hunting until she grew too heavy, made
a handsome Dutch sailor or colonel of the guard. She would change her
garments three times in a ball; a dozen times in a day. Like Anne, she
set her face against the old Russian debauches, and was for a French
elegance, or a poor imitation of it. Luxury of every kind she
encouraged, until the court shone with diamonds and gold brocade; and
for her operas singers were brought from the ends of Europe. Reading was
bad for the health, she said, and she avoided it.

She was, and always had been, very pious. There she differed
emphatically from her father, and the orthodox clergy fell furiously
upon dissenters and seceders. She observed the fasts rigorously, she
knelt in prayer until she fainted, and she had a great veneration for
the relics of the saints and holy places. To the end she made
pilgrimages afoot to famous shrines like the Troitsa monastery. In her
youth she had made the journey in a day, and had had a lover to meet her
there. Now she would walk out a few miles from Moscow--the court
spent one year in four at Moscow--then ride back to the city, and
begin her pilgrimage on the morrow at the point where she had left it
the day before. It often took weeks to make a pilgrimage. She insisted
so closely on decency that one day, as she prayed in church, it occurred
to her that the angels painted on the walls were really cupids, and she
had them repainted. Her own elderly gallantries we will see later.

With all this she, as I said, paid substantial attention to the
interests of Russia. Sweden had collapsed in the late struggle, but
Chétardie and Lestocq were instructed to induce her to be generous and
give it some of the territory taken from it. It is generally difficult
to disentangle the action of a sovereign from that of her advisers, and
Elizabeth may have more credit for firmness than she deserves. She, at
all events, refused, and the war went on until Sweden was crushed.
Russia kept a large part of Finland. At last intercepted letters made it
plain to the Empress that the gallant French marquis who bowed and
flattered her was really trying to injure Russia in the interest of his
country, and he had to go. She was, however, still infatuated with
France and her French doctor, though Count Bestuzheff, who became her
chief adviser, persistently warned her against France. Lestocq, who took
bribes from all Powers and fancied himself a master of intrigue, now,
with the aid of the French minister, made a desperate attempt to win
her.

Elizabeth’s chief rival in good looks was Natalia Lapukhin, a noble lady
of equal freedom in manners and morals who had viciously tormented
Elizabeth when she was the Cinderella of the court. To her surprise she
had been, at the coronation, made a Lady in Waiting. But she remained
insolent, and at a ball she appeared in a pink robe and with pink roses
in her hair; and pink was understood to be an imperial monopoly at
Elizabeth’s court. Elizabeth’s temper was much shorter than her prayers.
Many a maid got the heavy imperial slipper across her mouth for talking
when the Empress dozed on her couch, and her language at times resembled
that of the guards. She had a buffoon cruelly tortured for playing a
trick which frightened and upset her. She now fell furiously upon the
audacious Lady in Waiting. She sent for scissors, made her kneel while
she cut off the roses (and hair along with them), and cuffed her twice
across the face. “Serves her right,” she said, when they told her that
the countess had fainted. To her bosom friend, the Countess Bestuzheva,
wife of the elder Bestuzheff, Natalia often told what she thought of the
Empress, and in both families the talk over tea was mildly seditious.
Lestocq got his agents to ply Natalia’s son, young Colonel
Lapukhin, with drink and learn it.

And on July 21st, 1743, the physician rushed to the palace with a report
of a conspiracy. Elizabeth lived in daily dread of a conspiracy, knowing
how easy such things were in Russia. She cowered behind a hedge of
soldiers and let Lestocq arrest whom he would. She had humanely
abolished torture and the death-sentence; but this was a different
matter. Natalia and her husband and a score of others were imprisoned,
and the old torture-chambers rang again with the shrieks of delicate
women whose limbs were stretched until they cracked. It is said, but is
difficult to believe, that Elizabeth was secretly at hand to hear their
confessions. There was, in fact, no conspiracy to confess, but Lestocq
was one of the three commissioners appointed to examine the prisoners,
and Elizabeth was stung by the table-talk that was wrung from them. One
of the women was pregnant, and the Empress was asked to spare her the
torture. “She did not spare me,” said the daughter of Peter the Great.

They were all condemned to death. For ten days Elizabeth lingered over
the sentence, but in the end, she observed her own decree. She commuted
the sentence to exile, flogging, and mutilation. Natalia Lapukhin, a
beautiful woman in the prime of life, was partly stripped before an
immense crowd, and brutally knouted. She sank, covered with blood, to
the floor of the scaffold, and the executioner roughly finished his
work, and, with a brutal laugh, offered to sell her tongue to the
highest bidder. Countess Bestuzheva slipped a bribe into the man’s
hands. The lash fell less heavily on her white back, and less of her
tongue was cut out. The mutilated wretches went the worn way to Siberia
and the north. Count Michael Bestuzheff, who was innocent, was
despatched on a foreign embassy. Alexis, at whom the French had chiefly
aimed, was untouched. He was astute as well as able.

At the end of the year Elizabeth transferred the court to Moscow and
prepared it for a new sensation. She had chosen a bride, or a girl to be
trained as bride, for her wastrel of a nephew. After her weakness for
France, which was then a deadly rival of Russia, came a weakness for
Frederick the Great, who was far more cynical and crafty in his
professions of friendship and determination to sacrifice Russia’s
interests to his own. He flattered Elizabeth, and laughed at her.
Hearing that there was question of a future Empress, he strongly
recommended the daughter of the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, one of his own
generals. A courier sped to the little court where Sophia Augusta
Frederika lived quietly with her mother, and that lady, a remarkably
ambitious person for her station in life, hurried to St. Petersburg, and
on to Moscow. Both Peter and Elizabeth were indecently impatient to see
the bride-elect, and they professed themselves entirely satisfied with
the quick-eyed, precocious maiden of fourteen who would one day be
Catherine the Great.

Sophia and her mother were lodged in the Kreml, and the work of
preparation began. The young princess soon realised her destiny and
determined not to spoil it. But she had three near misses within a year.
She worked so hard at the Russian that she would get up during the night
and pace the room, repeating her lessons, in bare feet; and she caught
pneumonia and nearly died a few weeks after her arrival. Incidentally
she won the Empress’s favour completely. In the hour of danger they
asked if she would see her Lutheran pastor. No, she said, the Russian
priest; and the rumour of her piety, which--she afterwards said--was
really policy, spread through the court. She was received into the
Russian Church in July, and solemnly betrothed to Peter. Then Peter had
the smallpox and nearly died; and in fine her mother nearly spoiled her
prospect. She had come with secret instructions from Frederick of
Prussia, and, like a good German, she stealthily pushed his interest.
The inquiry into the supposed Bestuzheff plot exposed her, and she
retired to her obscure province. But Elizabeth liked her daughter, and
Catherine--her name was changed on entering the Orthodox
Church--remained, and married Peter in the following year.

The years that followed were filled with European struggle, which does
not much concern us here. The capture of the letters of Chétardie
exposed the machinations of both France and Prussia. Elizabeth found
herself described as living in a state of “voluptuous lethargy,” and her
passion for France and Frederick suddenly chilled. Alexis Bestuzheff
became her chief counsellor, and inclined her toward England and
Austria. The court was honeycombed by intrigue, and even the favourite,
Lestocq, was at length (1748) detected in his treachery. He was put to
the torture and banished.

Elizabeth was not long drawn out of her “voluptuous lethargy.” In fact,
the attainment of middle age seemed to bring back the looseness of her
youth, and her lovers were the jest of the courts of Europe. One of her
pages, Ivan Shuvaloff, was promoted and placed in apartments near those
of the Empress. Ivan took his good fortune modestly, but the customary
tribe of relatives appeared and blossomed into wealthy and influential
courtiers. Count Bestuzheff and others were alarmed, and they put in the
way of the Empress a very handsome young amateur actor named Beketoff.
Elizabeth genially added the youth to the intimate circle which caroused
in her room at night, but Peter Shuvaloff, uncle of the earlier
favourite, did not like the prospect. The more credible version of his
action is that he met young Beketoff one day, and, impressing upon him
how much the Empress liked to see her favourites fresh and healthy, gave
him a box of ointment for his face. There was in the stuff something
which caused an eruption of the skin, and his condition was represented
to the Empress in such a light that he fled.

It should be added that she still guarded the propriety of her subjects.
The elder Count Bestuzheff held that his wife’s crime had dissolved his
marriage, and he wished to take a second wife. Elizabeth sternly refused
to consent, holding that marriage was indissoluble. When the desperate
Count did at length marry she refused to receive his “paramour” at
court.

In many other respects she tried to continue the process of cleaning the
face of Russia. At first she had undone her father’s control of the
monks, and let them gather enormous wealth. As the needs of war pressed
on her, she revoked this and checked them. She endeavoured also to check
the irregularities and dispel the ignorance of the secular clergy.
Wandering priests would gather in the streets of Moscow and importune
passers-by to give them the price of a mass. Some are said to have held
a crust in their hands, and threatened to eat (which would make them
unable to say mass that day), unless a man offered his purse. Elizabeth
set the bishops to remove these and other irregularities. She promoted
letters, since it was the proper thing for an enlightened monarch to do,
and her ministers attempted to improve trade and agriculture.
Agricultural banks were opened; industries were protected; mines were
sunk; Siberia and the southern steppes were partly colonised. It was
forbidden for men and women to mix in the public baths. These were, on
the whole, slight improvements of a terribly backward country.
Ignorance, violence, drunkenness, dishonesty in trade, official
corruption, brigandage, listlessness, and idleness were still general.

The later years of the reign were filled with the inevitable Prussian
war. After years of diplomatic struggle Elizabeth, in 1756, concluded an
alliance with England. To her great disgust, and Bestuzheff’s grave
danger, England then formed an alliance with Frederick, and the French
redoubled their efforts to oust Bestuzheff and receive the friendship of
Russia. By this time the Princess Catherine openly disdained her husband
and went her own way. For years the Empress, eager to see an heir to the
throne she would leave to Peter, tried to bring them together, but each
hated the other, and Catherine found consolation elsewhere. In 1754,
however, Catherine had a son who was presumed to be a Romanoff.
Elizabeth fell ill, and Bestuzheff, believing that she would die,
approached Catherine, through her latest lover, Poniatowski, and
suggested that he could make her Empress if she would support his
anti-French and anti-Prussian policy.

Elizabeth recovered, however, and declared that the good of the world
demanded the destruction of Frederick of Prussia, who had said caustic
things about her. The Seven Years’ War opened, and Russia joined France
and Austria against Prussia. The Russian army under General Apraksin won
a great victory, and then, instead of pressing it, retired. Now this
coincided with a second serious illness of the Empress, and the French
envoy raised a cry of treachery. Vorontsoff, who waited impatiently for
the official shoes of Count Bestuzheff, and hated Catherine, joined the
French in demanding an inquiry. Bestuzheff’s papers were searched, and
it was found that he had been in communication with Catherine. A plot
was easily constructed out of this material. Bestuzheff was to raise
Catherine’s baby to the throne and make her Regent; and Apraksin’s
troops were withdrawn toward the capital for the event of the death of
Elizabeth.

Catherine in later years looked back with a shudder upon that critical
time. Bestuzheff contrived to send her word that he had burned her
letters, and there was no danger, but she saw a very serious danger. She
wrote to Elizabeth, and for weeks she received no answer. At last she
was summoned to the Empress’s room. Her enemy, Alexis Shuvaloff, was
with the Empress; her husband, another enemy, waited in the room; and on
the table she saw letters that she had written to Apraksin. They were
innocent letters, but what right had she to communicate with commanders
in the field, as if she were already Empress? With tears and prayers she
mollified the angry Empress, and her enemies were beaten. Apraksin died
of apoplexy, and Bestuzheff was compelled to retire to his estates.

For the brief remainder of the reign of the Empress Elizabeth Catherine
went warily. Elizabeth, who was little beyond her fiftieth birthday, would
not control her appetites, and her health slowly departed. She became a
chronic invalid and would lie for hours on a couch admiring the little
babe, Paul, who would carry on the line of the Romanoffs. Some
misgiving in regard to the future seemed to trouble her. Peter, though a
Romanoff, was emphatically a brutal German. He lived in an entirely
German atmosphere; an atmosphere of smoke and beer-fumes and Teutonic
disdain of everything Russian. Catherine, on the other hand,
had developed into a thorough Russian. Her strong sense and feeling of
policy told her to eradicate all Germanism from her composition and
wholly transnationalise herself. Peter had an immense admiration of
Prussia and Frederick, while Catherine was a Russian patriot.

And Elizabeth hated Prussia. Throughout her last years she kept alive
the League against Frederick and spurred her generals in the struggle.
Frederick sought peace, and she refused it. France and Austria became
faint under their efforts and sacrifices, and she lashed them to the
task. All through the year 1761 her strength ebbed, and she saw
Frederick sinking from defeat to defeat. Would death spare her to see
Prussia crushed? Would that unhappy nephew take over her power before
her work was completed, and spare his idol? Her own ministers drooped,
and her resources wore thin, but she cried for decisive and utter
victory. In December a fit of coughing brought on hemorrhage, and she
entered the last stage. She died on January 11th, 1762, in the
fifty-third year of her age, not the least picturesque figure of the
Romanoff gallery of monarchs.



 CHAPTER XI
 CATHERINE THE GREAT

WALISZEWSKI, a vivid historical writer who has covered nearly the whole
period of the dynasty, calls the Empress Elizabeth “the last of the
Romanoffs.” If every rumour of those gossipy days were admitted, few
genealogical trees of the Russian aristocracy would hold good. There
have not been wanting historians who have claimed that Catherine the
Great was a natural daughter of Frederick the Great; and a grave writer
has said of Catherine’s son, Paul, that the _only_ ground for regarding
him as the son of Peter III is his resemblance to that monarch. We may
assume that Peter, who now peacefully ascended the throne and continued
the dynasty, was the grandson of Peter the Great, the son of his
daughter Anne.

It is, however, true that the moral physiognomy of the Romanoffs changes
with Peter III, and it is not clear how a German father and a few years
of early life in Germany could so thoroughly Teutonise his blood. We
must, of course, not forget that most of what we read about him was
written by his wife or by other enemies. Mr. Bain refuses to believe
that he was brutal to Catherine, as she says. At his accession he paid
her heavy debts and settled upon her the large domains of the late
Empress. His unfaithfulness to her was at least balanced by her own
vagaries. She, a German, took the throne from him, and she was bound to
make a dark case against him in order to justify her usurpation. They
were, at all events, as ill-assorted a pair as ever mounted a throne,
and every informed person in Europe wondered what would be the issue,
and was prepared for another revolution.

We have seen a little about their earlier years. Elizabeth drew them in
their childhood from Germany, changed their religion, and appointed
tutors to prepare them for the throne. Catherine prepared very
diligently, but Peter went in a precisely opposite direction. While
Catherine steeped herself in the Russian spirit, he remained German,
looked with contempt upon Russian ways, and surrounded himself with
foreigners. He had the vices, without the good qualities, of the
Romanoffs. He drank heavily, was boorish to those about him, and lived
loosely. Catherine tells a story which is a cameo of life at the court,
if so sordid a sketch may be compared with a work of art. Empress
Elizabeth’s private room, in which the little suppers of the later part
of her reign were held, was separated only by a door from one of Peter’s
rooms. The noise he heard in it at nights piqued him, and he bored holes
in the door, and found Elizabeth, lightly dressed, carousing with her
lover and a few intimate courtiers. He called Catherine, who (she says)
refused to peep, and then he called a bunch of ladies of their court to
come and enjoy the spectacle. Catherine pictures him keeping dogs in
their bedroom and coming to bed, very drunk, in the early morning to
kick and pummel her.

There can be little doubt that the young prince was coarse, violent, and
drunken; and Catherine hated his insipid, pock-marked face and boorish
ways. Long before the death of Elizabeth she took a lover, Sergius
Saltykoff, a handsome young fellow of Peter’s suite. Bestuzheff sent
Sergius on a mission abroad, but his place was soon taken by a handsome
young Pole, Count Poniatovski. In the meantime, Catherine had given
birth to her son Paul, and the genuineness of the claim of the later
Tsars to be considered Romanoffs hangs upon the very slender thread of
Catherine’s morals. Saltykoff was at the time generally regarded as the
father. The boy, however, grew up to resemble Peter, morally and
physically, so closely that historians now generally consider him a son
of Peter. It looks as if Catherine, to save her position with Elizabeth,
who pressed for an heir, reluctantly consented to provide one. Legend
has it that the court deliberately instructed her to have a child
by her lover if she could not be reconciled to her husband. Catherine
tells us that, when the child was born, Elizabeth sent her a present of
fifty thousand dollars, and that Peter got the draft cancelled.

It is sometimes said that Poniatovski, who is described as being put in
Catherine’s way by political schemers, was detected by Peter and fled to
escape a whipping. The legend really runs that he was held up by Peter’s
servants, as he left the palace, and brought before Peter. He was a
youth of twenty-two, of no courage, and he expected a whipping, but
Peter laughed at his fright. Peter’s mistress at the time, and until his
death, was Elizabeth Vorontsoff, niece of a great noble of the court; a
very plain and insignificant little woman whom Catherine disdained to
notice. The prince felt that he could now force Catherine to be
courteous to his mistress, and it is said that he arranged suppers for
the quartet. The Empress, however, heard of the _liaison_, and
Poniatovski had to go. Catherine had a second child, Anna, in 1758, who
is believed to be the daughter of the Pole. The court was by this time,
we saw, thoroughly demoralised, as all knew that the Empress herself
caroused at night, and Catherine cast aside all pretence of propriety.
At the time of the Empress’s death her lover was Gregory Orloff, a very
dashing young officer: a young man of superb and colossal frame, of
features that fascinated women and of the time-honoured habits of
dissipation.

If we are to understand the character of Catherine, we must endeavour to
regard these irregularities with her eyes. It is sheer nonsense to seek
to put her on a moral level with Elizabeth or any other aristocratic
Russian dame who mingled amours with prayers, and equally venerated
monks and lovers. Catherine had not the least inner respect for the
Russian Church, or any branch of the Christian Church, and its ideals.
For political reasons she conformed outwardly, but it is difficult to
find that she had more than a vague and not very serious deism. She read
and corresponded with the French “philosophers,” and in her letters to
them (when she became her own mistress) she ridiculed the “mummeries” of
the priests. “I congratulate myself that I am one of the imbeciles who
believe in God,” is the extent of her profession of faith. She did not
respect the authority and ideals of the Church, and so she regarded
herself as free. These irregularities need not in themselves be
considered inconsistent with her title of “the Great.”

Liberal writers express some surprise that her lovers were never more
than handsome and sensual blockheads. We shall see that Orloff, little
intelligence as he had, could work for her, but that she probably never
weighed. She was a woman of high intelligence and self-confidence. She
chose ministers to do work and lovers only for enjoyment. There is no
psychological mystery in such an attitude.

When Peter ascended the throne he surprised all by his policy of
conciliation. He issued an amnesty, and from all the frozen recesses of
the Empire came the victims--the sobered Lestocq, old Marshal Münnich,
Julia Mengden and her sister, the Birens, and so on--of the earlier
revolutions. Then he set himself to conciliate his subjects. Peter the
Great had forced education and public service upon the reluctant nobles:
Peter the Little removed the compulsion, flatteringly observing that it
was no longer necessary. Peter the Great had created a secret police
which had ruled the aristocracy by terror and corruption: Peter III
abolished it. Peter the Great had put crushing taxes upon peasants and
dissenters: Peter III relieved them, and, caring nothing about Russian
orthodoxy, favoured the industrious dissenters. He abolished the
corporal punishment of officers; he confiscated the wealth of the clergy
and the monks, making them an annual allowance; he bade the monks
educate themselves, and forbade them to take young novices.

But these reforms angered one very powerful class--the clergy and the
monks--and Peter went on to alienate the army. He despised everything
Russian. Elizabeth had given him the palace (built by Menshikoff) of
Oranienbaum, about twenty-seven miles from St. Petersburg, and there he
had established a few companies of Holstein soldiers, the nucleus or
model of his future army. He fancied himself a soldier, and spent his
time there as Peter had spent his at Preobrajenshote. After his
accession he announced that the army was to be Germanised. New uniforms
were provided. Old regiments were threatened with extinction. What was
worse, he made peace with Frederick of Prussia, who might now have been
utterly crushed, and held up that monarch to Russia as a model king and
soldier.

To Catherine he was at first, as I said, generous, but serious rumours
got about that he intended to send her into a convent and marry his
Vorontsoff. At a public and important banquet he is said to have
insulted her, calling across the table that she was “a fool.” In short,
he put together an admirable collection of combustible material, and he
was surprised when the flame of revolution burst forth.

How it was arranged is not very clear, as Catherine afterwards claimed
the entire merit, yet a dozen others claimed the merit--and the reward.
As far as one can judge, Catherine was nervous and did little. Gregory
Orloff and his brothers had not so clear a vision of the possibilities,
in case of failure, and they worked zealously. Catherine’s
little friend. Princess Dashkoff, a very romantic young lady who read
Voltaire and Diderot and had great ideas, claims that she did more than
anybody; she clearly helped to buy or convert supporters. The French
agents found money, the soldiers were secretly canvassed, and the
growing discontent with the Emperor was carefully nourished. A
statesman, Panin, was more or less won: some say at the cost of the
virtue of Princess Dashkoff. Catherine herself had, about this time
(April, 1762), a third child, who was quite acknowledged to be the son
of Orloff.

The last blunder of Peter was that, after making an ignominious peace
with Prussia, he wanted to make war upon the Danes for his little
principality of Holstein. On June 24th he went, with Elizabeth, to
Oranienbaum, and ordered Catherine, whom he refused to regard as a
serious danger, to the palace of Peterhof. The Emperor’s name-day feast
fell on July 10th, and he sent word that he would spend it with
Catherine at Peterhof. He arrived there on July 9th, to find that
Catherine had fled, with one of the Orloffs, in the early morning; and
before many hours he learned that the capital was taking the oath of
allegiance to her.

On the previous evening one of the chief conspirators, Captain Passek,
had been arrested, and Gregory Orloff had been kept under observation by
an agent carousing and playing cards with him all night. Princess
Dashkoff says that she ran about, stirring the conspirators, and saved
the situation. At all events Alexis Orloff rushed into Catherine’s
bedroom, at Peterhof, at five in the morning, and urged her to come to
St. Petersburg and begin the revolt at once. They arrived at the
barracks of the most reliable regiment at seven, and roused the
soldiers. There were soon a copious supply of brandy and shouts of
“Long Live the Empress.” Catherine went to the Winter Palace, and
courtiers stumbled over each other in their eagerness to offer
allegiance. Catherine maliciously says that Princess Dashkoff was
one of the last to arrive. The soldiers cast off their new German
uniforms, and begged to be led against those accursed Holsteiners of
Peter’s; and Catherine--she and the little, snub-nosed Dashkoff
dressed as officers--led twenty thousand men to Oranienbaum.

Peter had sent for his Holstein guards and loudly protested that he
would fight. As the news from the capital trickled in, however, he
changed his mind and took boat to Kronstadt. It is said that when the
sentinel, in the dark, challenged him, and was told that he was the
Emperor, the man said: “Go away; there is no Emperor.” He returned,
shaking with fear, to Oranienbaum, and offered to share his throne with
Catherine. She contemptuously refused that dangerous half-measure.
Peter, weeping like a child, and begging that they would not separate
him from Elizabeth, abdicated, and was sent into the country about
twenty miles away. Elizabeth Vorontsoff was sent to Moscow.

What precisely happened to Peter III is one of the many dark mysteries
of the romance of the Romanoffs. Five days later Catherine coldly
announced that the late Emperor had died of a colic which had sent a
fatal flow of blood to his brain. There is a rumour that he was
poisoned. There is another rumour, which is generally accepted, that
Alexis Orloff, who conducted him to Ropcha, strangled him; and there is
no evidence whether Catherine was or was not (as is generally believed)
a party to the murder.

There were the usual sunny days for all who had assisted in the
revolution. In three months nearly half a million dollars in money, and
great gifts of land and serfs, were showered upon the new court. Many of
the courtiers, however, did not long enjoy favour. In 1763, when
Catherine had gone to Moscow for her coronation, a certain Feodor
Hitrovo was arrested for treason. For some time there had been rumours
of plots to put Ivan V, the son of Anne and Anthony whom Elizabeth had
displaced, back upon the throne. Peter III had brought the poor youth,
now almost an idiot, to St. Petersburg, and Catherine had confined him
in the fortress of Schlüsselburg. The latest rumour in the capital was
that Catherine was to wed Orloff, and that the jealous courtiers were
determined to prevent her or to kill Orloff. Whether there was a plot or
no, it is clear that the promotion of the Orloffs had caused grave
murmurs. Princess Dashkoff, Panin, Captain Passek, and other
conspirators of 1762, were, to their mighty indignation, arrested on
suspicion of treason. They were released, but their term of favour was
from that moment clouded.

Another of the blots on Catherine’s reign, or one of those dark
tragedies into which the historian cannot penetrate, occurred in the
following year. The unfortunate Prince Ivan was killed in prison. An
officer of the garrison named Mirovitch plotted to release him, and it
is said that his guardians, who had orders to despatch him in case of a
dangerous effort to free him, carried out that instruction. Mirovitch
was executed, but it was remarked that there was no inquiry, and there
was not the customary punishment of the relatives of the executed
criminal. It seems, however, absurd to suppose that Mirovitch was hired
to give the opportunity of killing Ivan. History, again, gives Catherine
a not very cheerful verdict of “not proven.”

These early threats or suspicions of revolt were attributed by Catherine
to the traditional discontent and ambition of courtiers who were ever
ready to create a new throne for their own profit. But she saw clearly
enough the miserable condition of the country at large, and she opened
her reign with a determination to apply the remedy prescribed by the
liberal and humane principles of her French teachers. There must be
education, and in 1764 she issued an instruction to the authorities who
were to take up that work. Her own ideas were necessarily vague and
unscientific, and she soon found herself confronted by the traditional
difficulties: a massive and general ignorance so dense that it did not
want education, a shortage of funds, and a corrupt and listless body of
officials. A number of technical and normal schools--in all about
200 schools--were founded, and at St. Petersburg Catherine
established a large and admirable school for girls, but her vague
general scheme came to naught. Russia lingered on in the darkness of the
Middle Ages.

The reform of law and justice was the next great need. Catherine eagerly
devoured the writings of such reformers as Montesquieu and Beccaria, and
in 1767 she issued an instruction which was so liberal that it was not
permitted to appear in French. It abounds in humane reflections which
illustrate the soundness of her attitude as a ruler in her earlier
years. “The laws must see that the serfs are not left to themselves in
their old age and illness,” she said; and “The people are not created
for us, but we for the people.” She laid it down, vaguely, that “the
rich must not oppress the poor,” and “every man must have food and
clothing according to his condition.” There were even echoes of the
new French words, liberty and equality. The torture of witnesses was
described as a barbaric practice. Sentence of death must be imposed
only in the case of political offenders.

Little came of her large scheme of reform. A Legislative Assembly, drawn
from all ranks of the people, met in 1767 to give definite shape to her
ideals, but its two hundred sittings ended in futile disagreement. No
one wished to better the condition of the serfs at the expense of the
landowners, and Catherine partly undid with one hand what she did for
them with the other. The serfs of the ecclesiastical estates, which she
secularised, were set on the way to freedom, and Catherine theoretically
wanted to see the end of a virtual slavery which was inconsistent with
her philosophy. But she herself gave enormous estates, with tens of
thousands of serfs, to her favourites, and she knew that human beings
who were transferred like cattle were treated like cattle. In her reign
the Countess Daria Saltykoff had to be imprisoned for barbarously
causing the death of a hundred and thirty-eight of her serfs. They were
still bought and sold as blacks were in America, and their proprietors
could for slight causes send them to Siberia. The great mass of the
Russian people lived in this state of degradation.

 [IMAGE: img240.jpg Catherine II]

Catherine’s strong will nearly always failed before an internal problem
of this kind. The nobles triumphed, and Russia remained in darkness and
chains. In her later years, when her early benevolent despotism had
given place to a fierce hatred of democracy, she persuaded herself that
her people were better off than most of the peoples of Europe. She
clung, however, to other parts of her programme of reform. Few were
knouted, and no other torture was permitted in her reign; and she
boasted that she never signed a sentence of death. Men were,
nevertheless, put to death, as we shall see; and it was commonly said
that the secret police were merely replaced by her mysterious official,
Tchechkoffski, who suavely invited suspected folk to his house. It was
believed that the chair on which his visitor sat sank below the floor,
leaving only the man’s face invisible to the servants in the room below
who applied torture to his limbs.

While Catherine pursued these and other designs of reform, which we will
consider later, her prodigality toward her favourites caused much
murmuring, and to this grievance she added the costly burden of war. It
is clear that in her early years she trusted to remain at peace, and had
no thought of the enlargement of the country. But the greed of Frederick
the Great now turned upon the decaying kingdom of Poland, and, to obtain
his large share, he had to invite the participation of Russia in the
plunder. Catherine, we saw, had hated Frederick, her husband’s
idol. It is said that amongst her husband’s papers she found a
letter in which Frederick spoke flatteringly of her, and she began to
turn to him. She did, at all events, change her attitude, and share with
him in the historic crime which is known as the partition of Poland. She
joined Frederick in imposing upon the Poles her old lover, Poniatovski,
and her armies went to the support of his rule against the rebellion
which followed.

France and Austria were now opposed to Russia and Prussia, and France
resorted to the familiar stratagem of inciting Turkey to attack Russia.
Catherine, whose energy was now fully roused, spurred her generals to
meet the Turks. They took the Crimea and a large part of the Slav
dominions of the Turk, but Austria now threatened to oppose the
southward expansion of Russia and suggested that compensation should be
sought in Poland. The first partition took place in 1771, and Catherine
secured “White Russia,” with a population of 1,600,000 souls. Turkey, in
turn, was forced to surrender the Crimea, pay a large indemnity, and
open the Dardanelles to Russian ships and the Ottoman Empire to Russian
trade.

But the burden of the war had fallen, as usual, upon the impoverished
people, and murmurs rumbled from one end of Russia to the other. The
plague broke out at Moscow, and tens of thousands died. The country
seethed with discontent, and it chanced that at that moment a figure
appeared round which the discontent might crystallise. A Cossack named
Pugatcheff claimed that he was the Empress’s husband, Peter III,
who was supposed to have been murdered at Ropcha, and his little troop
quickly grew into a formidable and devastating army. Soldiers sent
against him enlisted under his banner; brigands, barbarians, and Poles
joined in his campaign of loot and slaughter; an immense area of the
country was captured or laid waste by him. The revolt went on for four
years, when Pugatcheff was captured and beheaded. From that date
Catherine’s zeal for “the people” abated; and it was with some
recollection of this that she in a later year put an end for
ever to the power and remaining independence of the Cossacks.

The Empress, nevertheless, continued her work of reform. Official and
judicial corruption was as rife as ever, and she retraced more
practically the spheres of jurisdiction, and separated the
administrative from the judiciary officers. Like Peter (though unlike
him in her extravagant liberality to favourites, which increased the
evil) she hated and sternly prosecuted official corruption. Her scheme,
both of administration and of the dispensing of justice, was a great
reform, embracing every class of her people, if we take a liberal view
of the little she did for the serfs. She encouraged agriculture and
industry, made wise efforts to ensure the colonisation of the fertile
steppes of the south which she had acquired, founded about two hundred
new towns, and secularised (with just compensation) the enormous
property of the clergy and the monks. She pressed the introduction of
medical service, in order to combat the appalling death-rate of the
prolific people, and boldly submitted to vaccination and imposed it upon
her people. Her philanthropic institutions included a school for nearly
500 girls and a large Foundling Hospital which, during her reign,
received forty thousand children. In reforming the terribly loose fiscal
system she made notable improvements and raised the national revenue
from ten to eighty million roubles; but the increasing extravagance of
her court made a mockery of her financial reforms.

In fine, as is well known, she corresponded with Voltaire and the other
leading French thinkers, and made strenuous efforts, in her earlier
years, to arouse a corresponding culture in Russia. Her letters to
Voltaire are now believed to have been written, at least in part, by
Alexis Shuvaloff, and one cannot say, nor would one expect, that her
genuine letters and other writings indicate any great literary skill;
though her constant humour and vivacious personality make them good
reading. She purchased the libraries of Voltaire and Diderot, and made
famous collections of works of art, rather because it was the part of a
great monarch to patronise art than from any personal taste. To Russian
art and science, apart from (to some extent) letters and history, she
gave no impulse; and her own “discoveries” in the field of
science were amiable nonsense. However, the great literary output which
she stimulated, the foundation of an Academy (on the Parisian model) at
St. Petersburg, and the encouragement of the theatre must be counted
amongst her untiring efforts to educate Russia. How the French
Revolution checked her ardour, and turned her love of France into
hatred, we shall see later.

This programme of work, which I am compelled to compress into a few
paragraphs, fairly entitles Catherine, when we take its results in
conjunction with her extension of her Empire, to the epithet of “the
Great.” That she chose men of ability to carry out her will, even to
assist her in making plans, goes without saying; but she paid close and
industrious attention to all that was done, and she fierily resented the
obstacles to the complete realisation of her scheme. I have doubted if
the modern spirit can grant Peter the title of “the Great” for two
reasons: first, because of features of his character which we must
describe as brutal; secondly, because of the vagueness and casualness of
many of his plans and the lack of obstinacy in realising them. Catherine
was far from brutal. Her character had defects, which we will consider,
but they are not such as to make us refuse her the homage her work
deserves. That, on the other hand, her plans were imperfect, inadequate
to the vast need, often sketchy and not enforced with masculine
stubbornness, we must admit; but she was a great ruler. Let us complete
her work before we regard the personal features that lower her prestige.

The Crimea, now part of Russia, remained in a state of constant
disorder, and this became at length an open revolt. Catherine suppressed
the rebellion, and a few years later Turkey was induced to relinquish
all claim to the old Tatar principality. Catherine was now supremely
eager for a further extension toward the blue waters of the
Mediterranean, the immovable goal of all Russian policy. She suggested
to the Austrian Emperor, with whom she was now on excellent terms, that
Turkey should be dismembered. Austria should take the nearer provinces;
a new kingdom of Dacia should be founded, recognising the Orthodox
Church; and the Greek Empire should be revived and extended so as to
embrace Constantinople. Her grandson Constantine was to be the first
Greek Emperor.

Austria accepted the scheme, and Russian agents were sent to agitate in
the Slav provinces of Turkey. In 1787 Catherine herself made an imposing
journey in the south. Turkey clearly saw the threat to its Empire, and
in 1787 it declared war. Potiamkin, Catherine’s favourite at the
time, was entrusted with the supreme command, and marched south. Then
the ever-ready Swede fell upon the flank of Russia, and Catherine, who
could from St. Petersburg hear the roar of the Swedish guns on the
Baltic, had a momentary fright. She called up all her energy and stirred
her commanders, and in the following year she had peace with Sweden and
was free to attack Turkey, in conjunction with the Austrians. The
details do not concern us. The war lasted five years, and a little more
of the coast of the Black Sea was brought within the Russian Empire. It
may be added, briefly, that continued internal trouble in Poland, of
which Catherine took as mean an advantage as any, led to the second and
third partitions of that country. Poland ceased to exist; the once great
kingdom, ruined by the quarrels and obstinate conservatism of its
nobles, was divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria.

The vast addition to her territory which Catherine obtained from the
spoils of Poland will not be regarded by the modern mind as a title to
glory. More creditable was the wresting of territory from the Turks, but
her chief merit lies in the reform-edicts (she counted 211 of her ukases
under that head) with which she sought to uplift Russia. Against this we
have her personal repute as it is given in many historians. There were
those at the time who called her “the Messalina of the north,” and
writers on her still differ in their estimate of her moral personality.

That she was, in the narrow sense of the word, flagrantly immoral no one
questions. We may recall that Europe at large was still very far from
the standard of these matters which adorns our generation. Paris under
Louis XV, or the Directorate, or even Napoleon; London under the
Georges; even Rome under the Popes of the period would not pass modern
scrutiny. Russia was a little more mediæval than the others, and
Catherine inherited a court in which an Empress of advanced years and
conspicuous piety had given an example of wild debauch. To a woman of
Catherine’s views and strong personality there would seem to be no
reason for restraint; and she observed none.

We have seen her early lovers, and I do not intend to examine the
lengthy gallery with any minuteness. Gregory Orloff, an indolent and
very sensuous Adonis, enjoyed her extravagant favour until 1772. His
three brothers and he cost her, in those few years, about nine million
dollars. In 1772 she sent Orloff on a mission to the Turks, and during
his absence another mere sensualist, Vassiltchikoff, earned her favour.
Gregory heard it, and covered the two thousand miles which separated him
from St. Petersburg with a speed that beat all records. He was directed
to retire to his provincial estate, and from there he bombarded the
palace with entreaties. Catherine hardly attended to imperial business
for several months. At length she definitely discharged Orloff with an
annual income of 75,000 dollars, a present of 10,000 peasants, and the
right to use the imperial palaces and horses when he willed.

Vassiltchikoff made way in 1774 to the famous Patiomkin, a different
type of man from any of the others. He was in his thirty-fifth year and,
as we saw, he had ability. Her letters to him show the nearest approach
to tender feeling that we ever find in Catherine, except in her
relations with her grandchildren and her dogs. Patiomkin was of an age
to take his position philosophically when his two years of intimate
relationship were over, and he remained her favourite minister. From
first to last it is calculated that he cost her about twenty-five
million dollars.

After Patiomkin there was a period of what one is almost tempted to call
promiscuity. Man after man was lodged for a brief period in the
luxurious chambers near Catherine’s room, and any handsome young officer
felt that promotion lay within his power. Stories are told of ambitious
young men persistently mistaking their rooms and of Catherine maternally
sending them home for correction. No young soldier of athletic build and
fair face knew when he would be drafted to the well-known suite, and
find a preliminary present of 50,000 dollars in gold in his cabinet. For
the closer details of his initiation I must refer the reader to
Waliszewski’s “Roman d’une Impératrice.” In 1780 Lanskoi seemed to have
taken firmer root, but he died in Catherine’s arms in the same year.
Jermoloff succeeded him, and in 1792, when Catherine was sixty-three
years old, she adopted her last and strangest lover, Plato Zuboff, a
handsome youth of twenty-two. On this series of mere ministers to her
pleasure Catherine spent a sum which is estimated at more than forty
million dollars. That was a national scandal and entirely unworthy of
her character.

It is curious that in other respects Catherine had a great regard for
propriety. None dared repeat in her presence the kind of story or verse
that would have pleased Peter the Great, and she discharged several
officials for loose conduct. She also forbade mixed bathing; though she
allowed artists to enter the women’s baths. She was sober in eating and
drinking. The chief luxury of her plain table was boiled beef with
salted cucumbers, and until her later years, when she took a little
wine, she generally drank water coloured with a little gooseberry-juice.
She knew well, however, that in other parts of her palace her favourites
were enjoying the most luxurious banquets, and she never checked their
criminal waste. Her own son, Bobrinski, whom she seems to have regarded
with indifference, continually outran his generous income and contracted
heavy debts. She virtually exiled him to the provinces. It was reserved
for her lovers to riot as they pleased; that is to say, as far as money
was concerned, for she had the strictest guard kept upon their conduct.

With all her strength of will and tireless energy she loved social
intercourse of the liveliest description. She would play with children,
especially her grandchildren, for hours, and she had not the least
affectation of haughtiness. Although she never visited her nobles, she
was just as reluctant to receive the ceremonious and tedious visits of
foreign sovereigns. To her smiling favourites she responded, as we saw,
with an almost criminal generosity. When Potiamkin’s niece married, she
gave her half a million dollars, though her uncle had already been
enriched beyond any man in Russia; and she gave the same sum to the
bridegroom to pay his debts. When, on the other hand, she wanted some
difficult work done, especially by her commanders, she had a
persuasiveness that none could resist. Scores of times her mingled
pleading and driving induced her armies to do what seemed to her generals
impossible.

She had occasional flashes of temper, but her quick humour seized upon
this defect and helped her to control it. This other, occasional self
she called “my cousin,” and she watched it carefully. Normally her good
nature was remarkable, and one could give three anecdotes in
illustration of it for every anecdote that refers to her irregularities.
She rose at five or six every morning, and would often light the fire
herself. One morning, when she had done this, she heard shrieks and
curses up the chimney, and realised that a sweep was at work in it. She
hastily put out her fire and asked the man’s pardon. On another occasion
it occurred to her to ask, during a long drive, if the coachman and
servants had dined. She learned that they had not, and she held up the
carriage while they did so. When she heard that a lady she liked was
undergoing a dangerous delivery, she had herself driven to the house,
and she put on an apron and assisted the midwife. If her pen became bad,
she would (or did in one case) scribble on and tell her correspondent
that she had not courage to trouble a valet to bring a new one. On one
occasion she went out of her room to find a valet for that purpose. She
found him playing cards, and she took his hand while he ran for a pen.
But perhaps the best anecdote is that which tells of one of her
secretaries whom she overheard saying, after she had angrily scolded an
ambassador: “What a pity she loses her temper.” He was summoned to her
room, and in an agony of apprehension he fell upon his knees. Catherine
handed him a diamond snuff-box and quietly advised him in future to
take a pinch when he was tempted to give useful advice to his sovereign.

This geniality was in her later years somewhat soured. The first cause
of the change was the French Revolution; the second was the unfortunate
development of her son Paul. A short consideration of these two points
will form a useful introduction to the change which, with the nineteenth
century, comes over the rule of the Romanoffs.

That humanitarian zeal with which Catherine sought to reform her
country, and which she was careful to communicate to the grandson
Alexander whom she reared for the throne, was plainly due to the
influence of the French philosophers. If, like modern Europe, she
learned irreligion from them, she also, like the modern world, learned
the elementary lesson of the rights of man. She introduced tolerance
into Russia. That she sheltered the Jesuits, when even the Pope sought
to extinguish them, was not wholly a matter of toleration. “Scoundrels”
as they were (to use her own genial description), they helped her to
keep Poland quiet. But she believed in toleration, and she believed that
the state of the mass of the people was a reproach to any right-minded
monarch. Peter’s reforms had had a utilitarian basis: Catherine’s
were humanitarian, learned from the French humanitarians.

But the dark development of the Revolution turned her zeal for France
and democracy into hatred. In 1791 she wrote that if the Revolution
succeeded it would be as bad for Europe as if Dchingis Khan had come to
life again. In 1793, when she heard of the execution of the king, she
wrote: “The very name of the French must be exterminated.” She proposed
that all the Protestant nations should embrace the Greek religion “in
order to preserve themselves from the irreligious, immoral, anarchic,
scoundrelly, and diabolical pest, the enemy of God and of thrones; it
alone is apostolic and truly Christian.” We see the new Russia already
foreshadowed: a Russia fighting western ideas in the name of sound
ideals. But Catherine took no action beyond controlling the importation
of French literature. Even in that she showed her old personality. She
read the Parisian journal, the _Moniteur_, herself before she allowed it
to circulate. One day she found herself described in it as “the
Messalina of the North.” “That’s my business,” she said; and she allowed
the issue to pass.

The second source of annoyance was her son Paul. It seems--though the
point is disputed--that from the first she was cold to him (a fair
indication that he was Peter’s son), and to her grief he grew up
into a counterpart, in some respects, of Peter. It is said that she one
day learned that he asked why his mother had killed his father and
occupied the throne. He visited Frederick at Berlin against her wish,
and he married a German princess, the Princess of Hesse, whom she
disliked. This lady died in 1776, and he then married another German
princess, the Princess of Württemberg. He was thoroughly German,
flattered and duped by Frederick. “Russia will become a province
of Prussia when I am dead,” Catherine sighed.

In 1781 she sent the pair on a tour of Europe. “The Count and Countess
du Nord,” as they styled themselves, had a magnificent reception at
Paris, which made little impression on Paul, and a fresh grievance
awaited them on their return. Their sons, the little grand Dukes
Alexander and Constantine, had been removed by the Tsarina for
education, and she declined to give them up. The Prince and his wife had
to live apart, and Paul brooded darkly over every feature of his
mother’s conduct. He had the Romanoff taint in a form not unlike that we
find in Peter III, except as regards drink and coarseness. He was moody,
irritable, sensitive, suspicious, and obstinate. He quarrelled with
every good man, and as a result had about him a circle of dissembling
adventurers. Some said that he was epileptic; others that he took drugs.
It is said that when he was at Vienna an actor refused to play Hamlet,
observing that one Hamlet was enough.

Such a man readily accepted the rumour that Catherine intended to
disinherit him and pass on the crown to his elder son. She kept him out
of affairs, and, although he fancied himself a soldier and, like Peter,
brooded over dreams of military reform, she kept him out of the war. He
retorted with pungent criticisms of her young lovers; and they
insolently repaid him. “Have I said something silly?” Zuboff asked one
day when Paul expressed approval of what he had said.

It is believed that if Catherine had lived six months longer, Paul would
have been excluded from the succession. The Grand Duke Alexander, his
eldest son, was now a fine and promising youth of twenty. Catherine had
taken minute pains with his education, and even with the choice of a
bride for him. Eleven German princesses were invited to St. Petersburg,
and sent away disappointed, before the young Princess of Baden-Durlach
was selected. The parents were not consulted. Everybody expected that
Alexander would succeed his grandmother; indeed it was rumoured that the
decree was already composed and would be published on January 1st, 1797.

And on November 17th, 1796, Catherine died suddenly of apoplexy. There
seems little doubt that the cynical sensuality of her seventh decade of
life destroyed her strong constitution. I say cynical, not that she was
ordinarily cynical, but because there seems to be in her later conduct a
somewhat cynical defiance of moral and religious traditions. This was
weakness rather than strength; the same weakness which squandered forty
million dollars upon lovers when the national treasury had to be
replenished by extortion. Her mind was greater than her character; her
achievements were greater than both. Russia--the mighty Russian
people--was still chained in the dungeon of mediævalism. But Catherine,
the German who divested herself of Germanism--“Take out the last drop of
German blood from my veins,” she said to her physician--the pupil of the
French humanitarians, impressed the fact upon the Romanoffs that they
ruled a semi-civilised world.



 CHAPTER XII
 IN THE DAYS OF NAPOLEON

THE story of the Romanoffs has three phases. The first is the
preparation, when the primitive democracy of the Slavs is slowly
destroyed and the people are enslaved to an autocracy. The second, and
longest, phase is the enjoyment of power by the Romanoffs: the
succession of brutal or genial, strong or weak, merry or pious
sovereigns whom the accident of birth or the red hand of revolution
raises to the throne. A certain nervous instability runs through nearly
the whole series, but it is almost invariably expressed in a
determination to enjoy--to kill, to drink, to love, to spend, to seize
territory, to use power for self-gratification. In Peter the Great we
find a glimmer, amidst the old disorder, of a new day. In Catherine the
Great it revives and grows. Now the middle phase is over. We enter upon
a period of grave and sober-living monarchs, at first bent upon the
reform of their people, according to their ideals, then struggling in
fear against the people they have awakened from a long slumber.

The reign of Paul I is merely a dark episode between the second and the
third phase. He was now forty-two years old: a short, ugly, bald,
sour-tempered man, of diseased nerves. He hardly concealed his joy as he
hastened to the throne and strove to obliterate the memory of his great
mother. If she must have an imperial funeral, his martyred father shall
have one also. He digs up the corpse, or what is left of it after
thirty-four years, puts it in a magnificent coffin, and makes the
survivors of the conspiracy of 1762 walk humbly behind it, before they
are exiled. St. Petersburg is still a land of rumours, and we do not
know precisely what form his mad idea took. Some say that there was body
enough left to seat in the throne; some say that the skull was put upon
the altar and crowned with a superb diadem; some say that only the boots
and a few fragments of Peter III were found. Whatever there was received
an imperial funeral; and the bones of Potiamkin were dug up and cast
into a ditch. The usual golden shower descended upon the new brood of
favourites.

Then Paul began to enforce his grand schemes of military reform--and
alienate the army. They must abandon those new and serviceable uniforms
which Potiamkin had given them. They must return to powdered hair and
pigtails. Paul went along the line, on parade, and used his cane freely.
Old General Suvoroff grumbled, and was banished; though he had to be
recalled when war broke out. A regiment one day threw Paul into one of
his hurricanes of rage. “March--to Siberia,” he thundered; and they
marched, but were stopped on the way. Everything must be done on the
German model. Anything that reminded him of France was anathema. More
than 12,000 people were exiled or imprisoned in four years, generally
for trivial offences. He made some useful changes, but so many that
were petty and irritating that men thought him insane. He was, in fact,
on the road to insanity. He suffered from insomnia, and took opium.
People fled at his approach.

Paul sincerely wanted peace, but the French were overrunning Europe, and
he joined forces with Austria against them. Austria co-operated so badly
that his army, ably led by Suvoroff, had to retreat disastrously.
Bonaparte watched him astutely, and bribed his chief ministers. Next
England irritated him. Like Catherine, he challenged England’s right to
search neutral vessels, and, whereas England kept its Russian prisoners,
Bonaparte sent home, neatly dressed and armed, those that had been taken
by France. When England went on to take Malta, Bonaparte had an easy
victim. Paul had become grand master of the Order of St. John of
Jerusalem, and he considered that this gave him a special interest in
Malta.

At the beginning of 1801 Paul was pledged to France and set about the
formation of a league against England. And on March 24th, after a gloomy
reign of four and a half years, Paul met the end he had expected. He had
heavily fortified the Mikhailovski Palace, in which he lived, but about
midnight (March 23-24) Count Zuboff, Count Pahlen, General Bennigsen,
and a few others entered his chamber, roused him, and invited him to
abdicate. He refused, and it is presumed that a scuffle followed. It is
at least certain that Paul was strangled. It was officially announced
that Paul died of “apoplexy.” “Isn’t it time they invented a new
disease in Russia?” said Talleyrand when he heard. Napoleon was furious.

Alexander I lay upon his bed, dressed, when Count Zuboff rushed in to
say that “all was over.” He started, but he was at once addressed as
Emperor and could not misunderstand. He had agreed to the enforcement of
his father’s abdication, but had assuredly done no more. Whether he had
looked beyond or no we cannot say, but Alexander was a high-minded man,
a new type of Romanoff. While they talked, Paul’s widow came and heard
the news. She shrieked that she was Empress, and begged the soldiers to
support her rights. There was a second horrible scene in the darkness of
that winter night. They drew her away, and, when the day broke, St.
Petersburg burst into open and enthusiastic rejoicing, such as Romans
had shown at the death of Domitian, that the gloomy and misguided Paul
had gone the way of so many Tsars and princes. Strangers embraced in the
streets. There was no trial, but those who had been in the plot were
leniently removed.

Alexander I, the monarch who opens the new phase, came to the throne
with large and vague and lofty ideals. Not only should Russia become
happy and prosperous under his benevolent despotism, but all Europe
should be illumined. He averted the threatened war with England, which
had sent a fleet to the Baltic, and reaffirmed the friendship with
Napoleon. His new minister of foreign affairs, Kotchubey, agreed with
him. Russia must be kept clear of the entanglement of war and
concentrate upon internal reform. Kotchubey had soon to give place to
the Pole Czartoryski, who more sincerely shared Alexander’s romantic
idealism. The Tsar of Russia was to inaugurate “a new era of justice and
right” for the whole of Europe. An envoy was sent to London to
propose--there is nothing new under the sun--a sort of League to Enforce
Peace. England and Russia, the two powers which desired no further
territory, were to form its nucleus. Other Powers might join.

One hears plainly the echo of the French humanitarians and the English
whom they inspired. But how was the league to enforce peace upon France?
Russia moved slowly toward war. In 1804 the Duc d’Enghien was murdered,
and Alexander was outraged. He came to an agreement with England to
chastise Napoleon: only--as far as Alexander was concerned--for his
monstrous breaches of international law. Napoleon became Emperor and
King of Italy, and Alexander was further outraged. Kings were born, not
made. In 1805 he joined the Austrians on the battle-fields of Italy.

The story of Alexander I, the monarch who was going to impose peace upon
a foolish and distracted world, is one long story of wars, and it does
not enter into the scheme of this book to describe wars. How far
Alexander was to blame for the entry of his country into the struggle
against Napoleon, or into Napoleon’s struggle against England, is a
point on which opinions differ. His entire change of attitude--from
neutrality to war against France, then to friendship with Napoleon, then
back to the English alliance--annoyed his ministers and people, and lays
him open to a charge of nervous instability. Such a charge he would have
rebutted with warmth and astonishment. His portrait is familiar: a
smooth-faced, dignified man, reflecting righteousness in every feature.
He would have given a hundred reasons for each change in his policy. We
will notice these and the issues of his wars briefly, before we consider
his personality and his domestic work.

His first war ended in the historic rout of Austerlitz (1805), and his
optimism was sadly clouded. But when his mind was fixed upon what he
regarded as a righteous cause, he could be obstinate. Prussia and
Austria came to terms with France, and Alexander’s advisers were for
doing the same, but he refused. He entered the new coalition (Russia,
Prussia, Sweden, and England). Napoleon smote the Prussians at Jena,
frightened the Swedes into peace, and inflicted appalling losses upon
the Russians at Eylau. Alexander would not desist. He saw the King of
Prussia and swore eternal alliance, and Napoleon overran Poland
(1806-7). But Napoleon understood the naive mind of the Tsar, and knew
that he was angry at the remissness of England in supporting him. Before
long he met Alexander on a raft in the middle of the Niemen, and the
charm of his manner and righteousness of his proposals won the large
heart of the Tsar; besides that Napoleon cleverly conveyed to his mind
the impression that he thought seriously of choosing Alexander’s sister
Anna as his second wife. At the entreaty of his new friend Napoleon
spared the sovereignty of Frederick William of Prussia, though he
relieved him of his Polish gains and turned Poland into a Duchy of
Warsaw.

Kornilov, the ablest of recent Russian historians, maintains that
Alexander was not duped. He wanted time, and played his cards skilfully.
It is not easy to credit Alexander with such subtlety; and there are
those who think that Alexander sacrificed his honour and the interest of
his country. He was to break with England, when all St. Petersburg had
been educated to admire England, and he was _not_ to receive
Constantinople as his reward. St. Petersburg was thoroughly angry at the
change of policy, and Alexander had to change his ministers. The Russian
ambassador at Paris secured a confidential document in which Napoleon
declared that Russia was the natural ally of Austria and inevitable
enemy of France. Still Alexander persisted, though he was not a very
useful ally. He did, it is true, make war upon Sweden because it would
not place an embargo on British ships; but out of that war he got the
remainder of Finland, with 900,000 souls, for Russia.

The two Emperors met again at Erfurt in 1810. Napoleon had there a
mighty gathering of his royal vassals, partly to impress Alexander, and
he seemed to succeed. In later years, however, Napoleon himself
considered that Alexander was fooling him. He said that the Tsar had
“the duplicity of a Byzantine Greek.” Napoleon was a judge of duplicity,
but I prefer to believe in the simple-mindedness of Alexander, and do
not even see ground to seek psychological explanations of his
vacillations. He respected to the end the genius of Napoleon, but the
alliance was hollow, and in the next year the causes of quarrel
multiplied. Napoleon said no more about the Tsarevna Anna: he married an
Austrian. He seemed anxious to turn Poland into a French province. On
the other hand, Napoleon complained that his ally spoiled his
continental blockade against England, and put heavy duties on French
wine. Alexander, pushed by intriguers, got rid of his ablest minister,
Speranski, who was pro-French, made peace with Turkey and Sweden, and at
length entered into an alliance with England and Sweden. Both Emperors
now massed their troops at the frontier and joined them.

Napoleon’s famous Russian campaign of 1812 need not be described here.
The Poles hailed him as a deliverer, and he ran on until the continuous
retreat of the Russians and the appalling desolation they created as
they retreated made him uneasy. It was Alexander’s generals who were
responsible for that strategy. The Tsar himself expressed impatience. At
length, on September 15th, Napoleon gazed upon the golden roofs of
Moscow and felt that the end was in sight. How could Russia yield its
ancient capital and not acknowledge defeat? The next day began the
historic fire of Moscow, already evacuated by its population. Whether or
no General Rostopchin ordered the fire, the Tsar was not privy to it. He
wept when he heard of the tragedy. But it was a tragedy for Napoleon
also. The grip of winter soon began to close upon the desolated land.
The Tsar was whipping up his weary people with manifests after
manifests, imploring them to break the tyrant and help to take
“the blessings of liberty” to other nations. We shall see
presently that at this period he became almost fanatically religious.

 [IMAGE: img266.jpg The Red Square, Church of St. Basil and
 Redeemer Gate, Moscow]

At the head of his inspirited troops--he would, he said, not again leave
his armies to unenterprising generals, who could only retreat--Alexander
followed the pale and emaciated remnant of Napoleon’s “grand army”
across the corpse-strewn wastes. Then came Leipsic, the first nail in
Napoleon’s coffin. The Austrian statesman Metternich saw the Tsar at
Frankfort, and was for moderation in victory. On to Paris, said the
Tsar; and the encircling movement pushed the French gradually in toward
their capital. He was at Paris for the end, and he spent a few weeks in
London before he returned to receive a magnificent, and not unmerited,
ovation at St. Petersburg.

Alexander went himself to Vienna for the Congress which was to settle
the map of Europe. Again one must glance at his portrait to imagine him
at Vienna. He was the modest arbiter of the destinies of Europe, the
conqueror of Napoleon, Behind the scenes, however, was a limping
diplomatist named Talleyrand, who had returned to office with Louis
XVIII, and he and Metternich and Castlereagh ruled. Against
Alexander’s wish Poland was again divided, only Cracow and its
district receiving a republican independence. Napoleon suspended their
intrigues for a season by his dramatic return, but after Waterloo the
monarchs and statesmen met again at Paris to complete their work.

Here the personality of Alexander attracted considerable, and not very
flattering, attention, and we may linger over one of the last bits of
personal romance--of very chaste romance--in the story of the Romanoffs.
In the house adjoining his hotel, and connected with it, Alexander
established a lady who was soon known to all Paris. This was the
Baroness Barbara Juliana von Krüdener. In her youth Juliana had been a
fascinating and gay lady, of Prussian birth, who had virtually deserted
her elderly and prosy German baron for a French officer. Her nerves
deteriorated with her charms, and in 1804, her fortieth year, she had
been very seriously converted. A gentleman who was paying court to her
had fallen dead at her feet. Wandering to and fro in a state of extreme
nervousness, she came into touch with the Moravian Brethren and “got
religion.” The long war and comprehensive disturbance of Europe had led
to remarkable eruptions of mysticism. Napoleon was anti-Christ: the end
of the world was at hand. Prophets arose in every German village; and
Juliana eagerly sought them. She became convinced that it was her
mission to preach the millennium which was to precede the end.

In 1814 she met the Tsarina Elizabeth at Baden, and through her she
attempted to reach the Tsar. Alexander refused for some time to see her,
but he in turn went to Baden in 1815 and he allowed her to call. She
found him in a receptive mood. Since the burning of Moscow he had spent
much time over the Scriptures, and he was at this moment brooding over
the open page, seeking in vain the remedy of his mysterious
restlessness. Juliana harangued him, stormily, for three hours, and
captured him. He brought her to Paris, put her in the house next his
own, and attended her prayer-meetings. Nobles and famous writers of
Paris attended. Over all the horrors of the past men saw dawning the
glory of a new religious epoch.

All this has more historical and practical import than may be imagined.
Alexander invented a “Holy Alliance” of monarchs to put into force the
lofty moral tenets of the new mysticism. He showed the Baroness one
day--she annoyed him afterwards by claiming that she had written it--the
draft of a manifest of the Alliance. In three short articles the royal
signatories would bind themselves thenceforward to be guided, in
domestic and foreign policy, by “the precepts of that holy religion
[Christianity], namely, the precepts of Justice, Charity, and
Peace.” The whole document breathed the spiritual exaltation in
which the Tsar was at the time. The King of Prussia signed it without
wincing--to oblige his friend. Francis of Austria, very pious, but
taught by the Jesuits to suspect heresy everywhere, consulted
Metternich, who said it was a harmless piece of folly. He signed it.
Castlereagh advised the English Prince Regent that it was a piece of
sublime mysticism and nonsense; and the gay Regent accepted it in
principle, without signing it, and assured the Tsar that he would follow
its “sacred maxims.” The Pope refused to sign.

The practical importance of the matter is that the Holy Alliance became,
in effect, an alliance for the bloody suppression of democracy and
enlightenment, and the charter drawn up by Alexander became the code of
his persecuting successors and their nationalist supporters. Western
Christianity became faithless; it compromised with democracy, with
science, with liberalism. So the “holy religion” must be the
uncompromising Church of Russia, with its profound reverence for
autocracy and its hostility to enlightenment.

Alexander became sensitive that his association with the Baroness made
him seem rather ridiculous. He got rid of her, and from that time
maintained only a coldly polite correspondence. The astute Metternich
gained increasing influence over him, and there was no vagueness about
Metternich. Kings must guard their crowns, and ministers their
portfolios, against anybody--adventurers or democracies--who
wanted them. When the Greeks rose against Turkey in 1821 the Baroness
rushed to St. Petersburg and urged her pupil to take up “the holy
war.” Metternich told him that the situation was that the Greeks
had rebelled against their lawful sovereign, the Sultan. So Alexander
would not send a gun to aid either the Slav or Greek victims of the
terrible Turk. The whole Russian nation opposed him. When a great flood
brought tragedy upon St. Petersburg in 1824, men said that God was
punishing the Tsar. He was troubled, but did nothing. Justice, Charity,
and Peace he still loved; but he would lend no aid to insurrection. For
the remainder of his life he defended the absolute divine right of kings
and assisted in attempting to retard the birth of modernism.

The Poles felt his gradual deterioration. Russian Poland was at first,
with a show of generosity, converted into an autonomous kingdom under
the Russian crown. Alexander was the king; though the Poles had their
old flag with the white eagle. The Grand Duke Constantine was commander
of the army; though it was a Polish army. An officer of Napoleon’s army
was made Viceroy, and a general amnesty was granted. But Warsaw was far
away, and the harsh Constantine and the Tsar’s more reactionary
ministers ruled it. The Diet was soon left in abeyance, and the promises
of reform unfulfilled. The Poles angrily muttered that they had been
duped, and secret societies spread, with a result which we shall see
later.

But we are passing to Alexander’s last phase, the phase of reaction,
without having considered the reforms which came of his early
humanitarian zeal. He had, we saw, been educated (in part) by
humanitarians like La Harpe, imbued with the French spirit. Catherine
herself had, as I said, leaned to reaction, and let her reforms droop,
in her later years; and the interlude of Paul’s reign had been
thoroughly bad. Yet Alexander came to the throne with a magnificent
resolution to reform Russia. He was dreamy by temperament, and he had
neither the positive knowledge nor the quality of painstaking
perseverance which were necessary to construct a detailed scheme of
reform for so comprehensively backward a country. However, he appointed
a Committee of Reform, and he followed its deliberations with keen
interest.

During many years, especially from 1807-1812, Alexander had for this
work the splendid ability and devotion of a remarkably enlightened and
democratic statesman named Speranski. Professor Kornilov regards him as
“one of the most remarkable statesmen in all Russian history.” He was
the son of an obscure priest, a child of the people; and his large mind
and great capacity for detail enabled him to give definite shape to the
Tsar’s vague dreams of justice. He not only studied the new
democratic constitution of the United States, of which the Tsar obtained
a copy from Washington, but he followed Napoleon’s constructive
work with much sympathy and admiration. To Speranski the Tsar owed the
great scheme of reform which at first he made some effort to impose upon
Russia. It, unhappily, remained for the most part a paper-scheme. Years
afterwards, in 1830, the rebellious Poles found a copy of
Speranski’s liberal constitution and printed it, but Nicholas I
emphatically suppressed it.

The first task was to reform the central part of the administration,
which was chaotic. Eight ministries were created, and, although the Tsar
made the inevitable blunder of appointing favourites rather than
competent men in some cases, the change helped to create a more
effective machine. The heads of the departments were to form a cabinet,
or Council of Ministers, responsible to the Emperor, and below them the
administrative structure went down gradually as far as the Mir, or
village-council. The legislative machinery also began with the Mir, and
ended with the Duma, or national council, from which there could be an
appeal to the Imperial Council. The administration of justice was to
begin in the village and end in a reconstituted Senate; and Speranski
sketched a new code of laws on the model of the Code Napoleon.

Of this great scheme very little was carried out. The reformed Senate
found most of its proposals opposed by the Imperial Council, and the
Tsar himself, who was to be guided by it, chafed when it did not fall in
with his wishes, and often issued ukases in defiance of the opinion of
the majority. The new code of laws was put upon the shelf, and remained
there until the reign of Nicholas I. The hierarchy of popular councils
was not created. Alexander seemed to shrink from the logical
consequences of his “sacred maxims” when they were drawn out on paper by
a practical statesman, and he lent too ready an ear to the
reactionaries. As his piety increased, the conservatives found it
convenient to represent to him that these progressive ideas were
associated with atheism and revolt. The familiar type of political
adventurer, a man named Arakcheeff, appeared at court and secured wealth
and power. This man and his associates suggested to Alexander, in 1812,
that Speranski was promoting Freemasonry and subversive ideas, and the
great statesman--a man so far from Voltaireanism that he had translated
“The Imitation of Christ” into Russian--had to go. The Tsar wept maudlin
tears while he dismissed him.

The ministry of education, or of National Enlightenment, whose task was
vital to the reform of the country, seemed to make greater progress.
Alexander entrusted it to his mother’s educational adviser, Count
Tzadovski, and his own tutor Muravieff. Afterwards it was controlled by
Prince Golitzin, a follower of the new mysticism, but a serious and
liberal statesman. He was a patron of the Protestant Bible Society,
which Alexander permitted to open premises in St. Petersburg in 1812.
Alexander found from two to three million rubles a year for the
education department, and paid out of his own purse for the translation
of western works. Students were sent abroad for pedagogical training,
and after a time training-colleges were established in Russia. Three new
universities (Dorpat, Kazan, and Kharkoff) were founded, and these and
the older universities were to become central points in a scheme of
enlightenment for the various districts of Russia.

It is, however, usual to exaggerate the work done. We have already heard
much about the reforms of various rulers--of Philaret, of Peter I, of
Elizabeth, and of Catherine--but the fact remains that far more than
ninety per cent of the Russian people were still illiterate and densely
ignorant at the death of Alexander, and, although we shall hear of
further reforms, at least eighty-five per cent of the Russian people
were illiterate at the beginning of the twentieth century. The
sum provided for education was ludicrously insufficient for the task,
and the opposition was considerable. Merchants grumbled that they must
pay for the teaching of something more than reading, writing, and
arithmetic; the bulk of the nobles wanted only a military education for
their sons. In all about 200 higher schools (with classes of Latin and
Greek) and 2,000 elementary schools were founded: barely enough to
educate the five per cent of the population which was attracted to new
ideas. The work, like all the other reforms, languished in Alexander’s
later years, and was deliberately checked, in the interest of the
dynasty, by his successor.

The next great problem was the emancipation of the serfs, and here the
Tsar’s vacillation between his sentiments of benevolence and his vague
perception that they threatened the aristocratic system is more apparent
than ever. Catherine had had the same experience. She had spoken of
liberty and equality; and she had bestowed upon her favourites hundreds
of thousands of serfs who would, she must have known, be regarded and
treated as cattle. The restriction of the freedom of the peasant, by
which Godunoff had converted him into a serf, really handed over his
freedom to the higher authorities or put it into the hand of the
landowner. When a peasant wished to move, he might secure permission
from his lord by a payment of money. When a noble obtained a grant of
new lands he had to buy, or obtain by favour, a great batch of serfs to
work it. In practice the wealthy landowners bought and sold the
population just as cotton-planters then did in America, and the serfs
were generally treated with brutality.

Nearly every other country in Europe had long since abolished serfdom,
and Alexander saw clearly enough how inconsistent the institution was
with his “sacred maxims.” He discussed with his friends this “barbarous”
traffic in human beings, and we can understand how they assisted him to
salve his conscience. Reform must be gradual; an evil which was
centuries old, and rooted in the very structure of Russian society,
could not be cured in a day. In other words, the great sacrifice, which
justice demanded, must be thrown upon a later generation. Alexander
expended his zeal upon small alleviations of the sufferings of the
serfs. He forbade the masters to break up families, or to enforce
marriage upon reluctant serfs. He restricted the right of punishment,
opened the courts to the serf, and set aside large sums for the
emancipation of batches of serfs. He had a pamphlet published in which
owners were urged to treat the serfs humanely and promote emancipation.
So much was done under pressure of the humanitarians, but it was only a
trifling mitigation of the worst evil of mediæval Russia, and the new
regulations were not properly enforced. Russia was the land of the
wealthy. The millions of descendants of the original free Slavs must
toil on in squalor and ignorance. The day of reckoning was still to
come.

Arakcheeff tried an experiment in this connection which was bitterly
resented. He induced the Tsar to settle regiments of soldiers, with
their families, on the crown-lands, in military colonies. They were to
be special breeding grounds for recruits, and were to spread amongst the
peasants the spirit of military discipline. They were so carefully
organised--for Arakcheeff had ability--that even the mother was provided
with a set of rules which she must hang beside the holy ikons. The
peasants hated the innovation, and on Arakcheeff’s own estate they
rebelled and killed his mistress, who ruled them with the brutality that
he encouraged. The institution was afterward suffered to decay.

In the fiscal world, which was but another section of the Augean stable
of the Russian system, Alexander set out to make enlightened reforms,
and ended in the usual listlessness. The treasury had long been
artificially filled by the excessive creation of paper-money. Alexander
recalled a large proportion of it, but the strain of the war put an end
to this reform. An Imperial Bank was founded, a sinking fund was
started, and it was decided to publish an annual budget. It was
proposed, and partly attempted, to relieve the duty on the importation
of raw materials and impose heavy duties on luxuries. At the same time
the abandonment of Catherine’s extravagance at court relieved the
exchequer. These reforms were, like the others, a comparatively slight
mitigation of a great evil, and were in Alexander’s later years suffered
to droop.

In fine one must mention prison-reform, though the state of Russian
jails decades later does not dispose us to attach much importance to it.
During Alexander’s earlier years, we saw, there was at St. Petersburg a
great regard for English ideas, and at that time England was producing
many humanitarians. Robert Owen was then elaborating his comprehensive
and advanced schemes of reform, from the betterment of schools and
prisons to the substitution of arbitration for war. It is the enfeebled
echo of these liberal English ideas, and of American and French ideas,
that we find in the Russian schemes. One of the English
prison-reformers, Mr. Venning, asked permission to visit the Russian
jails. The Tsar, who was still in his early humanitarian fervour, gladly
assented, and asked Venning to make a report to him on what he saw. As a
result a Society for the Welfare of Prisoners was founded at St.
Petersburg, and afterwards at Moscow.

These liberal ideas represent, it must be understood, the early attitude
of the Emperor. After the fall of Speranski in 1812, and especially
after the Tsar’s close association with Metternich in 1814,
Alexander passed slowly from a state of nebulous zeal for Charity and
Justice to an attitude of positive reaction, tempered by a faint
lingering glow of his early dreams. Metternich persuaded him that the
real struggle of light and darkness was the struggle of the enlightened
monarchies against these democratic and “atheistic” emanations from the
smothered volcano of the French Revolution. In private he cynically
observed to his friends: “I have the Tsar safely at anchor.” The
humanitarian ideas on which the United States had been set up, and the
early and sane part of the French Revolution had been based, remained
in the mind of Europe. They threatened the restored monarchies, which
reverted to mediæval ideas of their power, and the terrible conflict
which fills the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe began
long before the death of Alexander. It is to his credit that he
recognised the blunders and crimes of his fellow-monarchs and never
entirely sacrificed his early ideals.

But the sinister Arakcheeff and the dreamy Golitzin spoiled the efforts
of Speranski. Golitzin introduced to the Tsar a “converted atheist”
named Magnitski, an abominable adventurer, and the man was put in
control of the universities. The higher teaching was reduced to a
comedy. Golitzin himself was too liberal and cultivated for the
plotters, and Admiral Shishkoff replaced him in charge of the ministry
of National Enlightenment. Shishkoff hated liberalism, and would suffer
no education that did not strengthen in the pupils’ mind a spirit
of blind subservience to the Church and the autocracy. A third power
among the reactionary forces was the Novgorod abbot, Photi, a zealot of
the old type who gathered about him a crowd of aristocratic women and
worked through them. Professors who had any tincture of liberalism were
now expelled from the schools. Some of the new schools were suffered to
disappear, and in all, lower and higher, the teaching was rendered
ridiculous by the fierce determination to protect the pupils’
respect for his pastors and masters. Political economy and the new
discoveries of science were rigorously banned. The Russophile school was
established; the fight against enlightenment was inaugurated.

But enlightenment could no more be suppressed in Russia than in Italy,
Spain, Portugal, and France, where the Papacy and the restored monarchs
used the old bludgeons against it. A large part of the nobles was, as in
France before the Revolution, imbued with the new ideas; and the
economic and other reforms were creating a middle class which, as in
England, gave many recruits to the humanitarian cause. Students,
teachers, writers, medical and other professional men joined the
emancipated nobles. The army of light began slowly to gather round its
various banners and face the army of darkness. As repression increased,
the many societies and liberal journals were merely driven underground
and their rhetoric became more fiery. There were “unions”
for everything of an advanced nature. In obscure clubs young men began
to talk even of a Russian Republic. The Tsar’s refusal to help the
Slav and Greek rebels against the Turk increased the anger of the
liberals and gave them a basis in the popular mind.

By the year 1824 Alexander had fallen into so morbid a state that he
spoke of resigning. He wept over his Bible and wondered if his sins were
not the curse of Russia. Even his domestic life was a burden. He had
married a Princess of Baden, and her lack of good looks was not redeemed
by any other charm except the cold adornments of virtue and piety. She
dressed dowdily, and she generally presented at his board a face as
melancholy as her creed. For many years Alexander had lived apart from
her, and he had no children. The genial dignity and self-esteem of his
earlier years broke down altogether. His next brother, Constantine, had
made a morganatic marriage, and forfeited the throne, and Alexander
distrusted the third brother, Nicholas. Alexander slowly and sadly
drifted toward the grave. His courtiers discovered a plot against the
autocracy, but he would do nothing. He died on December 1st, 1825: a
high-minded, well-meaning man, too little endowed in intellect and
strength of will to solve the mighty problems which were raised by his
own ideals.



 CHAPTER XIII
 THE FIGHT AGAINST LIBERALISM

ON an earlier page I remarked that the element of romance passed out of
the story of the Romanoffs with the last lovers of Catherine and the
murder of Paul. This is true of what we may call personal romance, but
it will have been apparent that a larger, impersonal romance now opens.
Not individual Romanoffs, but the Romanoff dynasty, must fight for
existence. Life at court is now too earnest for bibulous companions of
monarchs, and handsome lovers of queens, and plots of the anteroom. The
comedy is over; if one may call a comedy the enthronement of a selfish
and profligate monarchy upon the poverty and ignorance of millions of
human beings. The play now assumes the sombre note of tragedy. The
people, represented by a few of the educated few, begin to awaken and
claim their rights. The rest of the story is a ghastly record of the
efforts of the Romanoffs to prevent the spread of that awakening.

Nicholas I, who succeeded Alexander, represents the struggle of the
dynasty in a form which might be reconciled with conscience. He differed
materially from Alexander in two respects. First, although he was, like
Alexander, moderately endowed in intellect, he had great strength of
character and would stubbornly pursue any policy which he adopted. In
the second place, that policy was inevitably shaped by the accident that
he was born many years after Alexander. The eldest son of Paul I had
received his education at a time when Catherine was under the influence
of the French humanitarians. Nicholas came to the years of discretion
during her second phase, when the Revolution had soured her taste of all
things French and liberal. His chief tutor had been a French emigrant,
an incompetent teacher and a bitter enemy of liberal ideas. Nicholas had
grown up a rough and conceited boy. Later he had had abler teachers, but
he had yawned over their lessons. He had in 1817 married a daughter of
the King of Prussia, and, like almost all the Romanoffs, he thought a
minute acquaintance with military drill the first equipment for life. In
spite of hints from Alexander he refused to prepare for the serious task
of governing a great nation. By an unfortunate accident his vague
despotic mood was at the very opening of his reign hardened into an
attitude of fierce hostility to the new culture.

His elder brother Constantine had, as I said, forfeited his right to the
throne. He had fallen in love with a charming Polish lady, the Countess
Jeannette Grudzinsky, after divorcing his first wife. As no amount of
personal charm, not associated with royal blood, fitted a woman to
occupy the throne of Elizabeth and Catherine, the Tsar had, in 1822,
given him the alternative of losing either the lady or his right to the
throne. Constantine had not a regal disposition. He married Jeannette
and abdicated the right he had to the throne on the restored principle
of inheritance.

Nicholas knew of this abdication, though it was otherwise known only to
a few intimate councillors. But he knew that there was much feeling
against him in St. Petersburg, and he proceeded diplomatically. He
proclaimed Constantine Tsar. Prince Golitzin and others who knew of the
abdication begged him to refrain until the Council had opened a certain
sealed letter which Alexander had left, but Nicholas persisted and sent
word to his brother at Warsaw. Constantine refused the throne, and for
several weeks letters went backward and forward. Nicholas was very much
attached to his brother, but it is probable that he wanted time to study
the threatening situation in St. Petersburg and secure the stability of
his throne. He yielded on December 13th, and fixed the following day for
the taking of the oath of allegiance.

On the 14th a large body of troops and the customary crowd of citizens
assembled in the square, and suddenly the cry “Long Live
Constantine” rang from the lips of various companies of the
soldiers. “Long Live the Constitution” was also shouted; and
it is said that the ignorant troops, who had been told to add this,
thought that it was the name of Constantine’s Polish wife.
Nicholas, who did not lack courage, came out of the palace and
endeavoured quietly to convince the soldiers that his brother had
abdicated. They repeated their cries, and the nucleus of mutineers began
to grow and form a compact body. It is thought that if those who had
arranged the plot had had more courage it might have succeeded. But
Prince Trubetzkoi, the leader, kept out of sight, and there was no
vigorous direction. General Miloradovitch approached the soldiers to
reason with them, and was shot. The Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, his
golden cross lifted high in the air, next addressed them, and he was
contemptuously told to go home and mind his own business. The night was
falling, and it was feared that under its cover a serious riot would
occur. Nicholas ordered blank firing and, when the rebels jeered,
ordered grape-shot; and the rebellion was over.

After the burial of the victims came the inquiry, and it was thorough
and protracted. Two hundred and forty were arrested, and they included
men of the highest rank in St. Petersburg and many officers of the army.
Princes, counts, barons, and generals were on the list of the condemned.
The five ringleaders, including two colonels of military distinction,
were sentenced to be quartered, but the Tsar commuted the sentence to
hanging. The death-sentence had become so unusual in Russia that a
bungling amateur made a horrible tragedy of the business; but those five
first martyrs of the Russian people met their death with impressive
dignity and courage. Thirty-one were sentenced to be beheaded, and were
sent to the mines for life. Seventeen were condemned to the mines, and
had their sentences changed to twenty years’ imprisonment. Others
went, with their wives and families, to Siberia or to remote provinces.
And Tsar Nicholas I went to Moscow to be crowned.

Nicholas was sufficiently intelligent to realise that this conspiracy of
soldiers and nobles and intellectuals was a new thing in the annals of
Russia. He had a very candid memorandum drawn up from the subversive
literature which was taken with the conspirators, and he carefully
studied the condition of Russia as they had seen it. The new Tsar had a
type of mind entirely different from that of his brother. He had a
clear, robust, and narrow intelligence, unclouded either by mysticism or
moral hypocrisy. He seriously considered the evils of the Empire: the
corruption of officials, the arrears of payment which led to extortion,
the heavy taxes, the parody of justice, the general squalor and
ignorance, the State-monopoly of drink, the shocking condition of the
serfs, and so on. These things must be remedied; and they must be
remedied by the god-appointed person--the Tsar. That was his
attitude. In his Coronation-Manifesto he said:

“The statutes of the land are gradually perfected, the faults corrected,
the abuses remedied, not by insolent dreams of destruction, but from
above.”

The new Tsar was for “true enlightenment.” Any other enlightenment, any
unauthorised enlightener, must look out.

That was the note of the early part of the reign of Nicholas I.
Speranski was brought from his retirement and told to carry out the
reforms he had projected. His older code of laws was not passed, but he
was directed to codify the existing laws of Russia; which was something.
There were not competent lawyers in Russia to ensure the proper
administration of justice, and young men were sent abroad to study law.
But no youth must go and acquire education abroad for any other purpose.
No foreign teachers or tutors must be tolerated any more in Russia. No
foreign ideas must be permitted to taint the purity of the docile
Russian soul. No noble could remain abroad more than five years, and no
commoner more than three years.

A very rigorous and complete censorship was set up. All manuscripts,
even the manuscripts of journalistic copy, must be revised before they
reached the printer. Any that ventured to recommend the ideas which were
in France leading up to the Revolution of 1830, and in England to the
Reform Bill of 1832, were suppressed. Intellectual life must concern
itself with the native contents of the Russian tradition. It was
stifled. Russia was just at the stage of a literary renaissance, but it
was directed into this channel, and, as it was mainly artistic, it
contrived to thrive on nationalist soil. Pushkin and Gogol wrote their
famous stories and poems. Karamsin founded Russian history--of the
dynastic type. Young men like Turgenieff, Dostoievski, and Tolstoi
began, at the end of the reign, to take up the artistic tradition. The
national drama was advanced. But it was all genuinely Russian. The new
theologies and philosophies and sciences of the west were banned.

The censorship was moderated a little in 1830, when Prince Lieven, a
religious but cultivated man, became minister of education. For a time
the anathema was confined to matters which had a plain political import.
But after a few years a reactionary succeeded Prince Lieven, and the
task of preventing enlightenment was rigorously resumed. The second
revolutionary wave was slowly spreading over Europe. The stupid and
harsh dynasty of the French kings went forever. The reform of the
parliamentary franchise was now won in England. An historic fight
for freedom and knowledge was raging in Austria, Italy, Spain, and
Portugal.

 [IMAGE: img290.jpg Winder Palace, Petrograd]

Everywhere it was this detestable new middle class which was assailing
the old traditions. Young men of the working class to-day have little
conception in how overwhelming a proportion the champions and martyrs of
“the people” in those sanguinary days belonged to the middle class. The
task of rulers plainly was to check literature and the university-life,
which were manufacturing this intellectual middle class. Literature of a
modern kind was entirely suppressed. The universities were watched by the
police--the new secret police which Nicholas created as an instrument of
the threatened autocracy--and controlled after a time by the clergy. The
Slavophile creed was elevated to the rank of a philosophy. Against this
bold scheme of human development which the liberals were basing upon the
philosophy of Hegel, the “sound” teachers pitted a very plausible static
creed. It was, they said, the peculiar gift of the Russian soul to
reconcile the jarring elements of life, which in the west created only
discord. These new notions of democracy and evolution (which was just
emerging from the pit in England) and rationalism only increased the
misery of life. Look at the contrast of the restless proletariate of
England or France and the Russian peasant! Self-absorption in love, as
taught by Russian Christianity, not self-assertion, as taught by
religious and political rationalism, was the creed to make people happy.

The influence of the Church was ardently enlisted. Nicholas was
sincere--he read a page of the Bible every night to his wife--and liked
to have sincere people about him. He got rid of Arakcheeff and the
converted atheist Magnitski, and he upheld the abbot Photi. The Bible
Society was directed to return to England, and its property was
confiscated. The Roman Catholic Church had made progress under the
liberal Alexander. It was checked, and its property confiscated. The
secret police penetrated study and boudoir in search of traces of
heresy. In Poland four and a half million Roman Catholics were
“converted” to the Orthodox Church. In Protestant Livonia the Russian
priests and officials did almost as they willed. School-children were
damped with holy water and oil, and counted members of the Orthodox
Church. Presents of money or land settled the hesitating consciences of
their parents. The Russian Church supported the autocracy and
anathematised culture: all Russians must therefore belong to the Russian
Church.

It must not be supposed that this drastic campaign extinguished the
light in Russia. It merely compelled men to hide their light
underground, or to speak and write with discretion. A sullen and stern
fight went on all the time. Once the Catholics of Poland and Hungary had
tried to shut off Russia from the culture of the west and they had
eventually failed. Now the Tsars, who had torn down the barrier, would
set up a barrier of their own. It had no greater chance of lasting
success, though it did postpone the awakening of Russia. In the end,
when a third revolutionary wave spread over Europe, Nicholas doubled his
precautions. Not more than three hundred students were allowed at each
university. This was “true enlightenment.” But a nobler race
was rising amidst the densely ignorant mass, and Nicholas I could not
crush it.

It may be asked what he did for the honest improvement of the country
which he had sincerely regarded as the task of the autocracy. Very
little. To educate the mass of the people was, of course, a mischievous
delusion in the creed of Nicholas I. The spread of elementary education
was either arrested or carefully controlled. Under Speranski’s early
influence he appointed an official, Count Kisseleff, to look after the
eighteen million serfs on the Crown Estates, and the official was a good
man. Schools of a kind were established. The filthy and unhealthy habits
of the people were partly corrected. In 1842 a serf was enabled by
statute to purchase his freedom. In 1848 it was enacted that the serfs
of an insolvent landowner might collectively purchase the estate.
Nicholas encouraged nobles to free their serfs. Then came the French
Revolution of 1848, with its echoes all over Europe, and Nicholas
abandoned reform. Even within the limits of his own plan he had rendered
insignificant service, in comparison with the task which the papers of
the conspirators had impressed on him. The thirty years of his reign
were occupied in fighting the light which from all sides now sought to
penetrate the darkness of Russia.

The wars which interrupted or accompanied the Emperor’s efforts do not
properly concern us, but in some features they illustrate his
personality and work. On this side also the new morality of the
Romanoffs was degenerating rapidly into casuistry. Alexander had sought
neither war nor territory. The dynasty was converted from the brutal
attitude which had put the quintessence of glory in conquest by the
sword. Alexander interfered in European affairs only in the lofty
interests of justice and civilisation. Nicholas also was a lover of
peace and justice, and on this plea he started, or resumed, the Russian
policy of expansion southward which has since cost Europe so much blood.

As is well-known, Nicholas had provocation; indeed, until some other
force can secure protection for the weak, it remains an act of chivalry
for the strong to do battle for them. That at least was the almost
universal sentiment in the earlier half of the nineteenth century, and
we saw that the people of St. Petersburg bitterly blamed Alexander for
not interfering on behalf of the Greeks. Nicholas at once took up the
task that his brother had declined. Greeks and Serbs were trying to
throw off the brutal tyranny of the Turk, and the Sultan had sent the
most fanatical and least civilised of his soldiers to chastise the
insolent Christians. Europe rang with the horror of the massacres, the
mutilations, the rapes and burnings. It was assuredly the place of a
monarch who was of like creed to the Greeks and of the same blood as the
Serbs to demand justice for them, and Nicholas promptly demanded it. He
bade the Sultan evacuate the Balkans and grant autonomy to his Christian
provinces. England and France were equally moved by the outrages, and
not a little jealous of any action of Russia, and the three Powers gave
the Sultan an ultimatum. His refusal to comply led to the destruction of
his fleet at Navarino in 1828, and Greece won its independence.

It was the beginning of the abominable international jealousy which has
so long suffered the Turk to play the savage in Europe. The Sultan knew
that Austria was sufficiently jealous of Russia to support him, and he
believed that England was in the same frame of mind. He therefore sent
a pompous complaint to Russia, and demanded an indemnity. Nicholas,
knowing well the jealousy of the other Powers, baffled them by a
straightforward inquiry whether he would not be justified in chastising
the Turks. He would, he said, seize no territory in Europe, and would be
content to reduce the Sultan merely to a decent sense of his duty to his
Christian subjects. Austria trimmed in its reply, but England, France,
and Prussia consented, and Nicholas led his legions southward. Again I
refer to histories of Russia for the details of the eighteen
months’ war. It ended with the victory of Russia and the Treaty of
Adrianople (September 14th, 1829). Moldavia and Wallachia (now Rumania)
and Serbia were declared autonomous. The Dardanelles was opened to
Russian commerce. Russia secured an indemnity and the right to protect
Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire.

In the meantime a new page had opened in the relations of Russia and
Poland. The Grand Duke Constantine ruled the kingdom with more force
than wisdom, and he begged his brother, who had not been crowned King of
Poland, to come and impress the people of Warsaw by that ceremony.
Nicholas went, and swore to maintain the constitution which Alexander
had granted the Poles in 1818. He made matters worse, however, by his
arbitrariness. It was with difficulty that he could be induced to
tolerate a service of thanksgiving in the Roman Catholic cathedral; he
opened the Diet with a speech in French; and he usurped a function
of the Diet in nominating Senators. The discontent of the Poles, who had
absorbed western ideas, was greatly increased. It is said that there was
a plot to kidnap the Tsar. At all events, the complaints in the Diet
became so bitter that he closed it, in violation of the constitution,
and the discontent ran to underground conspiracy.

This plot was another element in the autocratic education of Nicholas I
and his successors. In July (1830) occurred the second French
Revolution, followed by an insurrection at Berlin. Nicholas was so
indignant that he thought of declaring war upon France, and he did offer
troops to the King of Prussia. But at the end of September he was
infuriated to learn that the spirit of revolt had spread to his own
kingdom of Poland. Pro-Russians had been massacred, and an attempt had
been made to capture the person of the Grand Duke, who had fled to
Russia with his few troops. General Chlopicki and the Polish regiments
had joined the revolutionaries. A Provisional Government, including
Princes Czartoriski and Radziwill, had been established.

In his sternest mood Nicholas sent 120,000 men against the Poles, who
hastily closed their intestine differences and gathered an army of
90,000 men. They fought with magnificent bravery, but the superior
Russian forces wore them down and entered Warsaw (September 7th, 1831).
It suited the humour of Nicholas to suppress a rebellion; and the
suppression, like the earlier partition, is one of the grim memories
which lie between Poland and Russia to-day. After punishing the captured
rebels, Nicholas went on to remove the very soil in which another
rebellion might grow. He destroyed almost the last remnant of Polish
nationality. The flag of the white eagle was abolished, the constitution
torn up, the higher schools and universities closed. On February 26th
Poland was declared to be henceforth a province of Russia.

At the other end of the Empire trouble in Georgia and Circassia gave
occasion to strengthen in that direction the rule of the Tsar. He now
reigned over the largest Empire in Europe, and almost every other Power,
but especially England and France, regarded the growth of Russia with
apprehension. Nicholas got the Dardanelles closed against foreign
warships, and so secured his Black Sea coast against attack. He had
assisted the Sultan to chastise one of _his_ rebels--Mehemed Ali, of
Egypt--and was rewarded with this concession. Europe moved toward the
Crimean War.

First, however, Nicholas had an opportunity of crushing another revolt
and chastising the supporters of the new ideas. The third revolutionary
wave, which was definitely to destroy the old political order in Europe,
began in 1848; and it began, as usual, in France. Louis Napoleon, who
was destined to give that country its last and not most fortunate
experiment in kingship, made an appeal to Nicholas for friendship, if
not alliance. But Nicholas liked neither an authority which was set up
by the will of the people nor a programme that pandered to the will of
the people. He rejected Napoleon’s appeal, and turned rather to
Austria, where insurrection seemed to be well on the way to shake even
the Hapsburgs from the throne. The Hungarians were on the point of
securing their independence, and the mediæval system which Metternich
had so long maintained was about to be destroyed. Nicholas gladly
supported his brother-autocrat. It was the Russian army of 190,000 men
which propped up once more the tottering throne of the Hapsburgs and
prolonged the struggle of darkness against light. Nicholas would learn
presently the utter selfishness and ungratefulness of Austrian policy,
as his last successor would learn at a later date.

The eyes of Nicholas were still upon the south, and the eyes of Europe
were upon Nicholas. There can be very little doubt that the whole of the
moralising Romanoffs of the nineteenth century had, behind their
professions of disinterested regard for the victims of the Turk, a more
or less clearly conceived design of gaining Constantinople and passing
over the Balkans, to the Mediterranean. Whatever sincerity there was in
their zeal for the protection of the Christian subjects of the Sultan,
they were far from insensible to the fact that these helpless Greek
Christians occupied territory which would, if it were annexed, bring
Russia at last to a free and warm sea. In Alexander this motive was so
far checked by an effort at sincerity, that he would not interfere
between the Greek and the Turk; he would be true to his later resolution
to help no insurgents. Nicholas held an even sterner attitude toward
insurgents, but the moment Christian subjects of the Sultan rose against
_their_ ruler he entirely forgot that they were rebels against an
hereditary autocracy. We shall find his successors equally lenient to
rebellion in the Balkans; and it is scarcely a diplomatic secret that
the Serbs, when they received the brotherly support of the last of the
Romanoffs in 1914, looked silently and anxiously for a less
disinterested purpose in the act of that monarch.

Nicholas now had the Sultan almost in a state of vassalage, and it
seemed to him that he had so far raised the prestige of Russia, and won
the gratitude of Austria, that he need hardly consider the western
Powers. Hence in 1853 he made a pompous objection when the Sultan
granted the French certain privileges in regard to the Christians of
Palestine. He sent Prince Menshikoff to Constantinople to establish a
definite Russian protectorate over all the Greek Christians in the
Ottoman Empire. Secretly, however, Menshikoff was to arrange an alliance
with Turkey against France, in case that Power gave trouble, and the
secret mission became known to the other Powers. It has been the
diplomatic pastime of the Sultans for several generations to take
advantage of the mutual jealousy of the Christian Powers which read them
such admirable lessons in virtue. Supported, behind the scenes, by the
English ambassador, the Sultan refused the Russian proposals, and
Nicholas decided upon war. He so little knew the secret action of
England that he discussed with the English ambassador at St. Petersburg
a plan for the division of the Ottoman Empire: England should, in the
teeth of France, occupy Egypt, and Russia should take Constantinople. He
at least expected England to be neutral.

It may at least be said for England, which naturally did not care to see
the Russian giant cast his shadow over Egypt and the route to India,
that it tried earnestly to avert war. France was less pacific. It would
like to see Russia in difficulties with England, and it secured an
alliance with England to the extent of pressing upon the Tsar a
round-table conference on the matters in dispute. The conference was
held at Vienna and a scheme of settlement was drawn up. This scheme the
Sultan, supported by a growing feeling in his own country and an astute
perception of the international jealousy, declined to accept without
modification; and Russia refused to admit the modifications he
suggested. Austria had played the Tsar false. In January (1854) the
English and French fleets had entered the Black Sea. The Sultan had at
the last moment signed the Vienna Note, and the Tsar had agreed to sign
it with certain modifications. It was Austria that procured the
rejection of these reserves. What came to be known as the Crimean War
opened.

Nicholas has been severely judged by some historians for his policy.
This censure is easy for the historian who has before his eyes the issue
as well as the commencement of the war. Russia was beaten and
humiliated. After appalling sacrifices she was compelled to sign a very
disadvantageous peace, and her new prestige in Europe fell considerably.
It is, perhaps, unfair to judge the man by the issue. But we may very
well surmise that Nicholas did little more than cloak an aggressive
design in the new mantle of righteousness which the Tsars affected. It
was, as usual, the people who paid.

The course of the war need not be described here. By a rapid
assault--which was represented in France and England as a premature
outrage, and did much to influence popular passion--the Russian fleet
destroyed the Turkish, and the Russian armies descended south once more.
Before the end of March England and France declared war on Russia in
alliance with the monarch who had for years reddened the soil of Greece
and the Balkans with Christian blood. The language of the time reads
curiously to-day. Nicholas issued a manifesto in which he warmly
disclaimed any idea of conquest; he drew the sword, he said, only in
defence of Christianity, and he was outraged to find France and England
supporting the Mohammedan murderer. They must, he said, be jealous of
Russia’s prosperity and eager to destroy it. England frankly sang
in its streets that it would never let the Russians get Constantinople.
France openly used the same language; though there were those who said
that Napoleon was personally irritated at the Tsar’s haughty
disdain of his credentials.

The war soon centred upon the Crimea, and its historic milestones--Alma,
Balaclava, Inkermann, Sevastopol--are well known. It entered upon a
second year, 1855, and the Russian people murmured bitterly. Nicholas
himself must have felt the sting of many of the criticisms. During the
long reign of his censors, when public opinion could not be brought to
bear upon the administration, official corruption had increased, and
both army and navy were far below the required standard of efficiency.
Nicholas had isolated Russia from the west; yet from the west had come
every stimulus to the improvement of the Russian forces. He had reversed
the policy of Peter and Catherine, and he seemed to be in danger of
losing the lands they had taken. A terrible fire of criticism and
invective was maintained at St. Petersburg. The censors controlled the
press--men circulated their views in manuscript. Nicholas was
honest, and it is said that he at times doubted if the policy to which
he had devoted his life was sound. But he was stubborn, and he thrust
aside all suggestions of peace. In the midst of the struggle he caught a
chill which led to pneumonia. He died on March 3rd, 1855.

Such was the opening of the last phase of the romance of the Romanoffs.
The dynasty is sobered, not merely by the spirit of the age into which
it has passed, but by the very impossibility of sustaining its gaieties.
No monarch who showered the precious national revenues upon lovers or
drinking comrades could long hold the throne in such an age.
Insurrection has taken a new form. It is no longer the work of a coterie
who would place a new monarch on the throne in order that they, the
conspirators, may take the place of the late favourites in the golden
rain. A new phrase, the rights of the people, is born, or re-born, in
the world. A monarchy by the grace of God must do the work of God, not
the work of the devil. Nicholas tries to reconcile the new and the old:
the new idea of service and the old idea of autocracy. He will better
the lot of the people, not because it is their will, but because it is
his divine mission. And in order to protect his scheme he constructs a
new machinery of despotism: secret police, and Cossacks, and priests,
and censors, and sophists. Against this machinery we have now to see the
Russian people bruise and crush their limbs until it and its autocratic
makers are destroyed. First, however, one more effort will be made to
pose as autocratic dispenser of Justice and Charity.



 CHAPTER XIV
 THE TRAGEDY OF ALEXANDER II

IT is said that in his last year Nicholas I observed that he would leave
a terrible burden to his son. He left a very costly war which turned
monthly against Russia. He left an empty treasury, and a privy purse
that was a million rubles in debt. He left a city and country that
bitterly murmured against the rule which he had intended to make so
benevolent. He left forty millions of his people in the condition of
serfdom which the whole of the remaining civilised world had outgrown.
He left a nation outpaced industrially and commercially by every other
Power because he could not admit into it the science which made the
others superior. As he brooded over his Bible at night he saw no
solution. He died in distress; and, as in the case of the death of
nearly every Romanoff, few mourned.

His soil, Alexander II, who confidently took over the legacy, was much
closer to Alexander I than to his father. He had the mediocre intellect
of the dynasty (after Peter I), but the sunny temperament
of Catherine, sobered. Unlike his father, who had listened only to the
wrong teachers, Alexander II had been an exemplary pupil, and he had had
good teachers. The new domestic atmosphere of the court is less
interesting than the old, and we need not linger over it. The picture of
Nicholas reading the Bible every night to his wife will suffice. The
Tsarina was a model German _Hausfrau_ on an imperial scale. Alexander
breathed this atmosphere easily. He was an exemplary youth. On the night
after the death of his father he took the Bible to his mother’s room and
read to her. His chief tutor had learned teaching from Pestalozzi, and
his lessons, which we have in part, were worthy of Marcus Aurelius. They
were exalted in principle, if vague in application. Alexander was to
make duty his star: his duty to his people and to civilisation. He had
travelled all over the Empire, even in Siberia; and the sight of the
exiles had so touched his warm heart that he had persuaded his stern
father to modify the treatment even of some of the conspirators at his
accession.

What would a young monarch--Alexander was thirty-seven years old--of
this type make of the formidable problem which his father had created?
We are quite prepared to hear that he is going to disarm rebellion and
win his subjects by kindness. He will make the autocracy so beneficent
that men will love it. A comparatively simple thing, the
young man thought. But the tragedy of the life of Alexander II is that
it was during his reign that Nihilism arose, dagger in hand, and he
himself fell by the bomb of an assassin who represented “the people.”

Russian funds rose in the European market when Alexander II mounted the
throne. He was well known: an amiable, kindly man, gently punctilious
about etiquette, very sober in meat and drink, very cold to flatterers.
Europe looked to him for peace; his people, who sank under their
burdens, looked to him for relief; liberals looked, not too confidently,
to him for justice. But Alexander felt that his first duty was to bring
the war, not merely to an end, but a successful end. He would not be
crowned until that was attained. A few weeks after the death of his
father he sent a representative to Vienna to take part in a
peace-conference. When France demanded that the Black Sea should be
neutralised and the naval strength of Russia limited by agreement, he
refused and he bade the war go on.

It went on, as is known, until Sevastopol fell, and Russia soothed her
feelings a little by taking Kars. Then the diplomats gathered round a
table to see what difference to the world the death of hundreds of
thousands of men and the squandering of three nations’ resources must
make. There was in Russia no chance of disguising the defeat. The Black
Sea _was_ neutralised. All the ships and forts on which so much had been
spent must go. Kars must be surrendered. The mouth of the Danube must be
yielded. The protectorate of the Christian subjects of the Sultan must
be abandoned. One war had put Turkey at the feet of Russia; another war
had put Turkey upon its own feet once more, and had set back Russia.

It was, however, peace, and the country looked eagerly for the domestic
programme of the young Tsar. He was crowned in August, 1856, and he at
once disclosed his policy. He would, of course, maintain the work of his
revered father; but it soon fell to pieces. An amnesty was granted, and
the rebels came back to the sunlight. The military colonies of
Arakcheeff were finally abandoned. Arrears of taxes to the extent of
twenty-four million rubles were remitted to the impoverished people. The
censorship was suspended, and St. Petersburg poured into liberalism like
a stream when the dam is broken. The manuscripts that had passed
stealthily from hand to hand, and been read behind locked doors, were
now sent to the press. Periodicals and pamphlets snowed upon the
metropolis. Unions and leagues for everything new and beneficent and
western sprang up like mushrooms. All the talk of English radicalism
filled the salons: self-government and emancipation of women, biblical
criticism and Darwinism, banks and railways and manufactures, education
and co-operation and political reform.

Presently the discussion would strike a deeper note. A certain Robert
Owen of England had advocated a scheme which he called Socialism.
Certain Germans were beginning to take the germ of Owen’s patriarchal
theory and make a “scientific system” of it. Russia was now free to
travel, and to import books. The mind which has been artificially
repressed will, if the process be not continued too long, expand more
rapidly than the mind which is suffered to grow normally.

In all this babel of humanitarian tongues, each reformer stridently
denouncing his brother as a charlatan, as is the way of reformers, there
was one steady and persistent note. Serfdom must be abolished. Here the
mass of the people agreed with the intellectuals. We are tempted to
picture the great body of the Russian people as too stunted in mind, too
dazed by labour and the stupefying conditions of their life, to
understand anything of this reform-language. But there is plenty of
evidence that they were quite alive to the idea of emancipation. They
had looked to each new Tsar, as he eloquently unfolded his lofty aims on
coronation-day, to abolish serfdom. They looked with particular
eagerness to Alexander. “Constitution” was too large a word for them.
But they knew what it meant to be free and to have their _Mir_ and their
bit of land.

Forty-two and a half million people in Russia were still serfs in the
year 1856: nine centuries after the establishment of the Russian Church,
two hundred years after the beginning of the rule of the Romanoffs. I
have, incidentally, given sufficient evidence in earlier chapters that
this serfdom differed little from slavery. The peasant was, in polite
phraseology, attached to the glebe. When a rich man ruined himself in
the dissipations of St. Petersburg and sold his estates, he sold the
peasants with the land. When a man opened new estates, he bought
peasants to work it. They had no liberty of movement, which is the
fundamental condition of liberty. They owned no land (except a small
number who secured the advantages offered by the last two Tsars) and
were therefore hot masters of their own labour. Half their labour must
be given gratuitously to their lord--this was the new, decent sort of
serfdom--who would then allow them to wring a miserable living for
themselves and family out of a fraction of his land with the other half
of their time. Not much earlier, we saw, great land-owners, even women,
could inflict on them such torture and death as few Romans are said to
have inflicted on their slaves in the worst days of the Empire. They
were still slaves, though humanely treated on the Crown Lands, much as a
wise farmer gives good conditions to his cattle. The lot of the peasant
of Russia to-day is hard enough. Imagine it sixty years ago with the
added yoke of serfdom.

Assuredly serfdom was the first and most monstrous evil to be removed,
and we saw that for fifty years or more the rulers of Russia had been
ashamed of this great stigma on their civilisation. At the very
beginning of the reign the rumour went out that Alexander would free the
serfs, and their wealthy owners were anxious. Alexander reassured them
to some extent. He would like to see an end of serfdom, but it was an
evil to be remedied gradually. He would like to see individuals reduce
it by freeing their Serfs. Soon after the close of the war the Tsar
again addressed the nobles, and begged them to give serious attention to
the emancipation of the serfs. It was plain that little would be done in
this fashion, and a few months later he appointed Provincial Committees
of land-owners to give practical consideration to the problem.

Historians seem to differ in discussing whether Alexander was moved by
his own idealism or by the pressure of the growing liberalism of St.
Petersburg and the clamours of the peasants. The point is of some
interest in forming a general estimate of the Tsar-Emancipator.
Professor Kornilov, while ascribing great reforms to Alexander II,
maintains that he was impelled from without rather than within: that his
moralising tutor had not been a liberal or a man of definite social
views, and had implanted in his mind only such general regard for
humanity and justice as a conservative may profess. Others would
represent the Tsar as a practical reformer of a liberal type, a little
soured in the end by the excesses and violence of “advanced”
people. Perhaps we are nearest to the truth if we picture Alexander II
as a man who united a real detestation of serfdom with a sincere regard
for justice in the abstract, yet would never have overcome the
conservatism of many of his advisers and the immense practical
difficulties but for the very effective pressure put upon him by the
rising impatience of educated Russians.

 [IMAGE img312.jpg Cathedral Erected in Petrograd in Memory of
 Alexander II]

The Provincial Committees wasted many months in futile discussion and
wrangling. Around them there now waged a great battle of amateur
sociologists, and half a dozen different theories of emancipation had
their schools of defenders. There was, to begin with, a vital difference
of views between the serfs and their owners. The peasant wanted land
even more than liberty; the owner felt that it was emancipation to give
liberty, and he was, as a rule, unwilling to part with land. There was
the question of compensation, which inspired endless discussion. A serf
was worth a hundred dollars. In short, the committees of local owners
did not want the work to proceed, and Alexander formed, at the beginning
of 1857, a Central Committee of twelve members under his own presidency.
The work was to be done “from on high.” Emancipation was
to be a voluntary gift from the Tsar.

The work still dragged. In 1855 Alexander had appointed the liberal
Lanskoi Minister of the Interior, and he zealously promoted the scheme
and secured the liberal Milyutin as colleague. But other ministers were
of the old school and unsympathetic. They pointed out that behind the
demand for emancipation other and more disturbing demands were becoming
articulate. Liberal nobles who were ready to emancipate their serfs
already claimed that this ought to be followed by their own political
emancipation. They demanded a Duma. However, even members of the
imperial family, like the Grand Duke Constantine, pressed for the
reform, and the Tsar at length formed an Imperial Commission, on which
the conservative opposition was checked. A law was drafted, and on
February 19th, 1861, Alexander announced to Russia and the world, with a
very natural exaltation, that the serfs were to be freed.

The serfs fell into three classes. Those on the Crown Lands were, as we
saw, already in an improved condition. The law of 1861 did not affect
them, but they were later (1866) put in the same position as the
emancipated serfs. Then there were a million and a half serfs who were
not on the land, but in personal service. These were ordered to continue
their service for two further years, and they would then be free. The
main body were the twenty-one million serfs on the estates of private
owners. Each was now to own his house, and the small strip of land
encircling it, and the entire community of peasants in a village were to
have, in common, a part of the arable land of the owner. The Slavophiles
had secured this reversion to the primitive custom of owning in common,
and one may justly suspect that they felt that the arrangement would
make the peasants more or less impervious to the new ideas about
property which were being imported from Germany. The _Mir_ was
re-established. But the land-owners were to sell, not give, their land;
and they were to be compensated for the loss of serf-labour. The entire
value was estimated, the State paid it, and the peasants were to refund
the sum within a space of forty-nine years. The _Mir_ was
responsible for the payments.

Alexander looked out upon his Empire for the signs of jubilation, and at
first he saw many. Even so drastic a rebel as Hertzen rejoiced. The
journals and pamphlets of the metropolis turned from acidity to a
temporary sweetness. Deputations of peasants, carefully chosen, were
brought to thank the Tsar, and in the tearful accents of the aged serfs
he thought that he heard the voice of twenty millions. But it was not
long before the reaction began, and a chill affected the liberalism of
the Tsar.

It was a very general belief of the peasants that the land belonged, by
ancient right, to them, and it had been in some way stolen from them by
the wealthy and noble. When, therefore, they heard of the scheme of
compensation, the payments which must be made annually until the death
of the youngest of them, they began to murmur. The officials, they said
in many places, must have falsified the words of the Tsar. There were
other grievances. The allowance of land to each had, in the heat of
discussion, been cut down to very small proportions. The owners were not
_bound_ to sell even this, and in many places they refused; and, where
they sold, they generally attempted to sell inferior land. Officials,
charged with the administration of the law, took bribes, and there was a
vast amount of foul play. In fine, the emancipated serfs now found that
a free man had to shoulder a burden of taxes heavier than they had
imagined.

In short, hopes had been improperly inflated, and the disillusion was
exasperating; nor was there now any lack of men imbued with the new
ideas who fostered the discontent. Lanskoi and Milyutin were dismissed
from office, through the intrigue of the conservatives, and the new
minister, Valuyeff, had not the same scrupulous regard for the success
of the law. In various places there were risings of the peasants, and
the troops had to use their muskets. In the government of Kazan ten
thousand peasants revolted, under the lead of Anton Petroff, and the new
era was stained heavily with blood. Petroff was executed; eighty of the
emancipated serfs were shot with arms in their hands. At the university
of Kazan the students boldly held a requiem service in honour of the
dead, and Alexander had to punish even the monks who celebrated it. The
“Tsar-Emancipator” did not long enjoy his popularity. The
clouds closed slowly, after the short burst of sunshine, and would cover
the skies of Russia henceforward until the last Romanoff quitted the
throne.

An even graver cause of distrust now arose. Alexander had visited Poland
soon after his accession and had paternally promised to make the Poles
happy, if they were good. “No more dreams,” he said genially to them.
His father’s work was to be maintained, he told them. Poland was to be a
province of Russia. He appointed a moderate governor, Prince Gorchakoff,
and declared an amnesty. Since the terrible repression of the rebellion
by Nicholas I a large number of Poles had lived in the various capitals
of Europe, and there they had been thoroughly educated in modern ideas.
In London, particularly, they had been steeped in the sober radicalism
that had followed the failure of the Chartist movement, the fervour for
the deliverance of Hungarians and Italians, the popular indignation
against Russia. Most of them would not return to a Poland which was not
free, but some did, and they assisted in the education of the Poles.
There arose a very general cry among the educated Poles for a
constitution; and Alexander believed no more than his fathers, or than
Pius IX, in giving a constitution that was asked as a right.

In November, 1860, a great demonstration was held in memory of the
revolution of 1830, and the authorities were annoyed. Demonstrations
increased for all kinds of undesirable objects, and the troops at Warsaw
fired and killed five Poles. A vast crowd of one hundred thousand
attended the funeral. The Tsar tried to conciliate them by small gifts.
He appointed a Polish Director of Public Instruction and Cults. He
created municipal councils for the large towns, and electoral councils
for each government and district. But he would not grant a constitution,
and the agitation increased. A great crowd went to the Viceroy’s palace
to formulate their demands, and soon two hundred of them lay dead upon
the pavement. The whole city went into mourning.

A new Viceroy, General Lambert, was appointed, and the Tsar instructed
him to carry out conscientiously the reforms he had promised. But the
officials who were to carry them out were Russians, and the greater
reforms were withheld. There were further demonstrations, and further
shootings. A reactionary soldier, Count Luders, was then made Viceroy.
His life was attempted. The Poles now openly demanded independence and a
restoration of Lithuania. Arrests and banishment were useless. The whole
educated nation seemed to be aflame. So on January 15th the authorities
decided to decimate the enthusiasts by an enforced recruiting for the
army, and Poland entered upon another futile rebellion. Those who
escaped the police fled to the country, secured arms, and formed
guerilla bands.

It was one of the most pathetic of rebellions. The insurgents had no
artillery, no transport or medical service. They moved about, often led
by priests, as they were hunted, living on the sympathetic gentry and
peasants, occasionally hanging or shooting a pro-Russian landowner. It
was not war, and the Russian troops hanged or shot all they captured.
The most curious feature of it was that a secret committee or council
guided the insurrection, levied taxes, and issued decrees from the
University of Warsaw itself without being detected by the police. Poles
abroad fierily preached the wrongs of their countrymen, and the English,
French, and Austrian governments formally requested the Tsar (1863) to
put an end to the anarchy. Two months later they formulated for the Tsar
what seemed to them the reasonable demands of the Poles; a general
amnesty, parliamentary representation, reform of the law of recruiting,
complete liberty of religion, admission of Poles to office, and so on.
Alexander indignantly refused. He did not add--one wonders if he
reflected--that it was precisely because the Sultan would not grant
such rights to his Christian subjects that Russia had made war upon the
Turk. Prussia supported, and promised assistance to, the Tsar.

The last sparks of the rebellion were stamped out in May (1864), and the
punishment began. The few traces that Nicholas had left of a Polish
nationality were now destroyed. The Polish language was banned from
schools and universities, and the chief rebels were executed. It was the
nobles, the educated class, that Alexander chiefly blamed; and it was on
that account that he granted the peasants of Poland the right to share
the land.

Alexander was less to blame in connection with another event, two years
later, which moved Europe to express its indignation. The settlement of
the Caucasic region was completed, and some hundreds of thousands of
Mohammedan Circassians and Georgians migrated from the occupied
territory and sought shelter in Turkey. The English Government again
made a protest at St. Petersburg, which was neatly countered by a
reminder that the state of Ireland hardly justified England in posing as
a moralist. The Circassians were, in fact, handsome ruffians with whose
ways the English were imperfectly acquainted. They freely sold their
daughters, the famous Circassian maids, to the harems of Constantinople,
and they were the most expert cattle-thieves and least industrious
workers of Europe or Asia. They were largely settled by the Turks on the
farms of the reluctant Bulgarians, and they willingly joined the
bashi-bazouks in cutting off Christian ears.

The brutality that was used in the suppression of the Polish
insurrection reacted upon the intellectuals of St. Petersburg, just as
the insurrection itself reacted upon the more or less benevolent designs
of the Tsar. But before we consider how the reign of Alexander II came
to inaugurate the terror which would for the next sixty years brood over
Russia, it is proper that we should briefly examine the remainder of his
reforms.

The emancipation of the serfs, though a measure of elementary justice
that had been too long denied, must nevertheless command our admiration
when we consider the stubborn opposition which the Tsar had to overcome.
It was not followed by the political emancipation of the nation at
large, but the Tsar created a popular institution which would, at a
later date, prove a valuable instrument of reform. The _Mir_ was
re-established by the communal ownership of the land. The district
council, the _Zemstvo_, was now established (1864). Each government (or
province) of Russia was already divided into districts, and there was to
be in each of these a Zemstvo, or popular council, formed of deputies
who were elected for a term of three years. They included
representatives of the landowners, the artisans, and the peasants, and
were to meet at least once a year, with a permanent executive committee.
A general Zemstvo for each province was also created.

At the time the Zemstvo had, in so far as it was obliged to act, few and
simple functions--the care of roads, bridges, sanitation, etc.--and the
imperial taxes were so heavy that it could not raise sufficient money
for other work. The Imperial Government, moreover, jealously watched,
and often interfered with, the work of the popular council. Yet it was
an important instalment of reform, and at a later date we shall find the
Zemstvo playing a greater part than the Tsar intended, in the
enlightenment and emancipation of Russia. Already it had the option of
building schools, and in many places it did so.

There was a corresponding improvement in the administration of justice.
The slovenly and corrupt traditional system was condemned, and an entire
series of new tribunals, framed on western models, was created. There
was a court for each district and a court of appeal, from which a final
appeal for revision might be made to the Senate. On the French model the
magistrates were to conduct the preliminary inquiry which had hitherto
been left, with disastrous results, to the police, and public trial by
jury was introduced. In the rural districts justices of the peace, who
were generally large landed proprietors, heard the petty cases which had
earlier been made a matter of rough justice, or injustice, between the
serf and his master. In such cases an appeal might be made to a bench of
justices if there was question of a fine of more than thirty rubles
(fifteen dollars) or more than three days’ imprisonment. Such
appeals were rare, as it was found that the hardy peasant preferred a
few strokes of the lash, as in the old days, to a loss of his money or
his time. In the higher courts, as well as in the army, flogging was
abolished.

Here again the demands of the liberals were, in theory, generously met;
and in practice they were largely evaded. Incompetence was inevitable at
the beginning of so large a reform, and some degree of ill-will and
abuse of power had to be expected. These defects do not detract from the
merit of the Tsar and his liberal ministers. But there was from the
first a tendency on the part of the imperial government to regard cases
as political and reserve them for the kind of treatment they had always
received. As the radical agitation grew, and the Tsar was driven into
the arms of the reactionaries at the court, this interference naturally
increased. Long before the end of Alexander’s reign the civil courts
were habitually ignored in precisely those cases which needed the most
impartial consideration, and men were detained and punished in thousands
at the whim of brutal and irresponsible servants of the autocracy.

These were the principal measures of reform granted by Alexander II in
his period of benevolence. With the fiscal improvements we are not much
concerned, but it may be noted that for a time a Budget was published.
Much was done in those early years (1861-1866) for education. The
restriction upon the number of students attending the universities was
removed, and there was a remarkable eagerness to obtain higher
education. Youths earned their living while they attended the classes,
and some scholarships were founded. Girls were excluded from the
universities, but we shall see presently how they broke through the
barriers and joined the youths of Russia in the demand for
enlightenment. A large number of secondary and elementary schools were
established. In 1877 it was claimed that there were 25,000 schools. The
press was offered the alternative of submitting its copy to a censorship
or risking the attentions of the police. The very name of Censor was
hated, after the experience under Nicholas I, and for a time periodicals
and books poured out upon an eager public. The restriction upon travel
also was removed, and men passed freely to the outer world which
terrified the Slavophiles, and came back with the language of Mazzini
and other apostles upon their lips. Foreigners in Russia received civil
rights for the first time. The restrictions upon the movements of the
Jews were modified, though “the Pale” was not abolished.

The history of that stirring period has been so frequently written in
the last thirty years that we no longer profess to find a mystery in the
fact that this reforming Romanoff fell by the hand of an assassin. Here
it is necessary only to give a short summary of the development after
1860 which entirely changed the character of his reign. We must remember
that from the first Alexander II did not recognise the rights of man. In
his best and most benevolent mood he was concerned only with the duties
of monarchs. The authority divinely entrusted to him was accompanied by
a divine mandate to make his people virtuous and happy. Within the
limits of a strict maintenance of the authority of the autocracy and of
the clergy he would do so. The more enlightened of his subjects might
respectfully offer suggestions, though that was properly the function of
the ministers he chose to guide him, but the correct attitude of the
people was to await, in patience and respect, the measures of reform
which the wisdom of his council sanctioned him in granting.

This was a fundamental anachronism, and, however generous the intentions
of the Tsar may have been and however misguided and exaggerated some of
the radicals, a conflict was as inevitable as the sunrise. Seeing that
the policy of his early liberal ministers did not pacify the country,
which became louder and bolder in its demands the more he gave it,
Alexander fell back upon the worn maxims of autocracy and surrounded
himself more and more with reactionaries. The wealth of the great
land-owners and the power of the clergy and monks were as much
threatened by the new spirit as was the autocracy of the Tsars. In the
recesses of the court there was, therefore, a complacent agreement upon
the kind of theory which has at all times reconciled the consciences of
good men with persecution. The “extremists,” it was said, were few in
number and morbid or perverse in sentiment. They must not be suffered to
abuse liberty to the detriment of the nation. Coercion was justified. To
coercion--which meant, in practice, the most wanton brutality and
violence on the part of baffled police--some replied with violence. In
effect, war was declared.

The crowd of young men who flocked to the University of St. Petersburg
when the restrictions were removed were the nucleus of the radical
movement which was gradually raised to a revolutionary heat. The
teaching of liberal professors, who were reconciled to gradual and
moderate reforms, only prepared them for a more highly seasoned
political diet, and there were powerful writers to purvey it. Hertzen,
who was in exile, sent his propaganda into the country much as Mazzini
taught the youth of Italy. His very radical organ, “The
Bell,” was the delight of the young folk who, in all ages, scorn
the timidity of age and are convinced that the immaturity of the
youthful mind is amply compensated by its superior candour. Bakunin, who
for a time joined Hertzen in London, and then settled in Switzerland,
taught a gospel which gradually approached, and finally reached,
anarchy. Tschaikovsky, who also was compelled to leave Russia, was the
inspiration of a “circle,” or discussion-society, at St.
Petersburg which had branches or affiliated societies in every town of
Russia. Bielinski and other radicals assisted the ferment of emotions
and philosophies. Krapotkin and Stepiak were coming upon the scene.

We have seen how the mind of Russian youth was prepared for these
advanced gospels. The monotonous misery and poverty of the country in
spite of every change of ruler, the corruption and brutality of
officials, the harsh measures of Nicholas I, the disastrous issue of the
Crimean War, the severity of the repression of the Poles, the
disappointing results of the emancipation of the serfs, and the
increasing perception that Russia lagged behind every other country in
Europe put a mass of inflammable material into the minds of the
educated. As early as 1862 a student was caught spreading a pamphlet in
which he advocated a bloody revolution against the dynasty, and was
exiled to Siberia. In the same year a series of mysterious fires in St.
Petersburg increased the agitation. Conservatives ascribed them to the
violent radicals: the radicals retorted that they were due to agents of
the reactionaries who wanted to provide a ground for stringent action.
The left wing of the reformers moved rapidly further west, and its
language increased in violence. The authorities raised the fees at the
universities and endeavoured to suppress the numerous students’
societies, but the agitation continued. Many of the nobles themselves
were in sympathy with the intellectual revolt. In 1862 several
gatherings of nobles and gentry passed a demand for parliamentary
institutions.

At the other end of the movement the conviction increased that no form
of centralised government would remain honest and disinterested, and the
philosophy of anarchy was framed. At first it was moral rather than
political, as it is in the minds of many Anarchists to-day. The
individual was to be relieved of the swathing bonds of all religious and
moral and other traditions, and the theory was that he would then
develop healthily. To this theory was first applied the name “Nihilism,”
which was afterwards, as Anarchy became more and more political
in complexion, extended to the whole revolutionary movement; though
Socialism gained considerably on Anarchy as time went on. It was the
period of Karl Marx and the early German Socialists, and the imposing
structure of Marx’s argument won large numbers of adherents.

One of the most disturbing features in the mind of conservatives was the
way in which young women adopted the advanced creed. The attempts of
Peter the Great to break down the barriers which confined the life of
women had almost ceased at his death. In the world of wealth, as
Tolstoi’s novels show, women kept the liberty of the reigns of Elizabeth
and Catherine. The new austerity of the court was not accompanied by any
general asceticism amongst the aristocracy. The philosophy of anarchy
provided a principle for what had hitherto been an inconsistent defiance
of religious traditions which were nominally respected. But the mass of
Russian women and girls, above the level of the peasantry, had hitherto
been unaffected by these liberties of the aristocracy. Now the cry of
the emancipation of woman penetrated remote country houses, and many a
girl broke loose from the control of a tearful mother or an infuriated
father, and sought the centre of enlightenment in the city. The
authorities refused to allow unmarried women to attend the higher
schools. They retorted, as Roman women had done nearly two thousand
years before, by entering into fictitious marriages. Gradually they won
the right to attend certain lectures at the university, and many of them
were found in the students’ circles where the reconstruction of
the universe was heatedly discussed.

The next development was that the intellectuals decided to educate the
workers. An officer of the army resigned his commission and turned
weaver. Sophia Perovskaia and other daughters of wealthy parents got
into touch with the working and domestic women. The police of the “Third
Section” (the secret police created by Nicholas) grew in numbers and
dogged the steps of these fiery young apostles. In 1866 a man named
Karakosoff, who had formed a society to promote the welfare of the
people, attempted to shoot the Tsar. An isolated fanatic, the Tsar was
told; and at that time there was certainly no real organisation of
assassination. But the pressure of the police and the daily risk of
arrest drove the agitation underground, and to their new quarters the
spies and informers and police followed them. There was now, plainly, no
question of persuading Alexander II to complete his scheme of reform.
There was increasing question of making war upon him and the autocracy.
It was the Russian tradition. When a Tsar was obnoxious you removed him;
but to do so in the name of justice, not in the name of a covetous group
of courtiers, was revolution of the worst order.

By this time, the early seventies, the Tsar saw that he had not merely
to deal with a few unbalanced individuals. The jails were full of
political prisoners. All the well-known leaders were in jail or exile,
yet the work proceeded amazingly. In 1874 there were 1,500 arrests. The
new courts were not called upon to decide the guilt of the prisoners.
They were knouted, or thrust into prison, or sent to Siberia. Large
numbers died in the overcrowded jails. Some went insane or committed
suicide. When the experiment of a public trial was at last made, in
1877, people were amazed at the calm courage and high idealism of the
young “criminals.” In 1878 nearly two hundred of them were tried. Many
received terms of imprisonment, or penal servitude, of from ten to
twenty years.

The rebels were now at war with the brutal ministers of the autocracy,
and they began to use the same weapons. A young girl from the country
came to St. Petersburg and shot the head of the police; and, amidst
great enthusiasm, she was acquitted by a jury. Another head of the
police was in the same year (1878) stabbed at Odessa. Spies were shot.
Groups of young men who were surprised in secret council by the police
produced revolvers and fought. The governor of Kharkoff, who treated
political prisoners with great brutality, was assassinated. Another
attempt was made to shoot the Tsar (1879).

In the meantime, it will be remembered, the Russo-Turkish war had
occurred, and it had the customary effect of increasing the people’s
burden and the discontent. The Slavophile party naturally gave birth to
a Pan-Slav party, and the traditional Russian ambition to spread over
the Balkans was revived. The Turks continued to treat their Balkan
subjects with great brutality, and in 1874 Bosnia and Herzegovina broke
into revolt, while Serbia and Montenegro, which were semi-independent,
joined with their compatriots in the war. The Pan-Slavs now pressed for
war, and there were those in the Tsar’s circle, such as his brother, the
Grand Duke Nicholas, who warmly supported the agitation. The financial
minister, on the other hand, who had carefully nursed the treasury into
something like prosperity, strongly opposed the adventure. The Tsar
wavered between his hope of getting the ignominous treaty of 1856 set
aside and his love of peace and dread of the costly chances of war.

There is now no doubt that Bismarck helped to urge him to war. Alexander
was pro-German, and had in 1870 secured the neutrality of Austria while
Prussia attacked France. It is true that, when the Germans meditated a
fresh attack upon the French in 1875, the Tsar interfered on behalf of
France and greatly angered Bismarck. That statesman, however, retained
influence at St. Petersburg, and, on the Frederician tradition of
encouraging rivals to wear out each other, he urged Russia to attack
Turkey. In 1877 (April) Russia entered the war, and its progress was so
rapid that in the following March it compelled Turkey to sign the
humiliating Treaty of San Stefano. Russia took from it very little
territory directly, but, besides securing the recognition of the
complete independence of Serbia and Rumania, it created a large
principality of Bulgaria in which it hoped to have a predominant
interest.

England was, unfortunately, still in its mood of favouring the Turk,
through jealousy of Russia, and Austria was less openly hostile. A
desultory war continued, and Bismarck astutely offered the services of
Germany as mediator, with the intention of curtailing its gains. By the
Treaty of Berlin (July 13th, 1878) the San Stefano Treaty was torn up,
and Bulgaria was cut down by half. Once more a costly war had, in the
eyes of the people, done little for Russia; and there was the customary,
and not unjust, cry that the course of the war had revealed a great deal
of official corruption. The tragedy of the reign of Alexander ran on to
its ghastly finale.

In 1878 it was decreed that in future political prisoners should be
tried by courts martial, and in the following year the Tsar appointed
Governors General of St. Petersburg, Kharkoff, and Odessa, and gave
additional and formidable powers to the Governors of Moscow, Warsaw, and
Kieff. The system of repression was to be drastically pursued. The
revolutionaries retorted by attempting to blow up the train in which
Alexander returned from a visit to the Crimea. Three mines were laid.
Near Moscow Sophia Perovskaia and a few associates had worked for two
months digging a tunnel to the line from a house they had taken. The
preparations were in this case perfect, but the Tsar escaped. The police
had arranged three trains, and, as the Tsar changed train on approaching
Moscow, leaving the middle for the first train, he was allowed to pass
unharmed, and it was the second train that was blown to pieces. Sophia
Perovskaia and her associates escaped and returned to their plotting.
The heads of the revolutionary movement had decreed the death of
Alexander II.

For the next fifteen months there was a thrilling war between the
revolutionaries and the “Third Section.” Time and again the Tsar’s
advisers declared that only a few dozen rebels were left, and the
country was substantially loyal. But, although hundreds were arrested
annually, though bribes and spies and all the ignominious machinery of
the police were brought into play, the “red terror” held the field
against the “white terror.” In February, 1880, not only the
Tsar, but all the imperial family, had a narrow escape. A revolutionary
named Halturin entered the service of the Winter Palace as waiter. He
discovered that the waiters’ quarters were, with an intervening
floor occupied by troops, directly underneath the dining-room, and he
proposed to fire a mine there. Day by day he smuggled into the palace
small quantities of dynamite and stored them with his belongings. The
police discovered a plan, on which the imperial dining-room was marked
with a cross, and they searched the floors beneath it. They did not find
the explosive, but from that day a stricter watch was kept, and no more
dynamite could be introduced. Halturin believed that he had enough, and
on February 17th he fired the mine at a time when the imperial family
ought to be assembled for a festive dinner. But the Tsar was late for
dinner, and again he escaped unhurt.

The closing scene is one of dramatic interest. It was decided to lay a
mine under a street through which the Tsar had frequently to pass, near
the palace, and at the same time station men with special bombs to throw
at the carriage, in case the mine failed. The conspirators hired a shop,
and, while some of them conducted a brisk and honest trade in eggs and
butter, others tunnelled beneath the street. The soil was removed in the
empty boxes, and, though the police several times visited the
shop, they detected nothing beyond a popular grocery business. The
tunnel was complete, and the mine ready, about the middle of March
(1881).

The dramatic feature is that meantime Alexander II was being induced to
consider proposals of reform. He had, after the outrage at the palace,
removed the Governor General of St. Petersburg and entrusted the
repression of anarchy to a Supreme Commanding Commission. The leading
spirit of this was General Loris Melikoff, who had had some success as
Governor General of Kharkoff. Melikoff’s method was to isolate the
terrorists by granting reforms which would conciliate the general body
of malcontents. He pressed this method upon the Tsar, as Alexander,
distracted and weary, perhaps a little anxious about his life, decided
to try it. The prisons and the settlements of Siberia were explored, and
large numbers were restored to their homes. About two thousand students
were permitted to return to the universities, and the scholarships were
restored. Melikoff then proposed a scheme of popular representation
which, though it did not exactly give Russia a constitution, might have
conciliated many. The reactionary ministers and courtiers now doubled
their efforts to restrain the Tsar, but he accepted Melikoff’s draft,
and kept it several days for revision. He probably wavered and postponed
the fatal decision. And it was during that week of delay that the
conspirators completed their preparations.

On March 16th Alexander read the draft to his ministers and approved it.
His relief at having reached a definite policy was great, and in happier
mood he drove out to review his troops. As he returned to the palace a
young woman in the street waved her handkerchief. She was the
redoubtable Sophia Perovskaia, and was giving the signal. A bomb was
thrown, and the carriage was wrapped in a cloud of smoke, while Cossacks
writhed on the ground. But out of the smoke and litter the Tsar again
emerged unhurt. Against the advice of his officers he lingered to say a
word to the wounded, and it is said that he congratulated himself on his
escape. “It is too early to congratulate yourself,” said a young man
who, through some oversight, had been permitted to approach. He flung
his bomb, and the Tsar fell, fearfully and mortally wounded. He died at
the palace two hours later. “They who draw the sword shall perish by the
sword,” the rebels grimly commented. The doctrine of the assassination
of tyrants--of men who stifled constitutional demands by the shedding of
blood--was then held by even moderate radicals in many lands. There were
others who pointed out that Alexander II, who had inherited an empty
purse, left many millions of rubles to be divided amongst his family.



 CHAPTER XV
 ENTER POBIEDONOSTSEFF

THE romance of the Romanoffs has now passed the phase of comparative
dulness which set in with the conversion of the dynasty from its license
of personal conduct, and has entered upon its final stage of mingled
melodrama and tragedy. The Russian people is awakening to a
consciousness that what some call an autocracy by divine right is a
foreign intrusion into the life of the Slavs, an infringement of the
rights of man. Three ways of meeting the crisis were open to the new
Emperor, Alexander III. He might grant the full constitutional liberty
that had now been won in every civilisation of the world except China;
he might follow the course traced by Melikoff and prolong the life of
the dynasty; he might prefer to extinguish every demand and insist upon
an unadulterated autocracy. Alexander III chose, with such modifications
as his vacillations allowed, the third course.

He was the second son of Alexander II. The eldest son had died in 1865
of consumption, but Alexander was a man of exceptionally strong
constitution. There is a tradition that he could take a horse-shoe in
his mighty hand and bend it until the points touched. Such a youth would
make a fine soldier, and as a soldier he was trained. He was cool,
courageous (as he showed on various occasions), regular in life,
sincerely religious, and very little cultivated. When his brother died,
he had to be prepared for the business of ruling a very unruly Empire.
But he was now twenty years old, dull in intellect, and altogether
indisposed to acquire the varied culture which his future required. One
of his tutors was the famous Pobiedonostseff: who was not at that time a
pronounced reactionary, but his office prepared the way for power in his
reactionary days. It is said that his wife, the Princess Dagmar of
Denmark, induced him to prepare more carefully for the throne; but that
seems to be a legend of the court. All that men knew about him was that
he liked soldiering and music and patronised historical research, and
thought that there were far too many Germans in Russia.

On this last feature some built a faint hope. Germany was now an
Empire, and the “League of the Three Emperors” (Germany, Austria
and Russia) boded no good for democracy. Bismarck encouraged both
the policy of repression in Russia and the policy of aggression
abroad because he did _not_ wish to see Russia develop her mighty
resources. On the other hand, Alexander was a soldier, a man steeped
in the Romanoff tradition of a divine autocracy and entirely out of
sympathy with humanitarian or progressive ideas. The only question
was whether from policy he would follow the lead of Melikoff. When
the oath of allegiance was taken he announced, ambiguously, that he
would walk in the steps of his father. Which set of steps? Melikoff
showed him the draft of a pseudo-constitution initialled by the late
Tsar. “There will be no change,” he said. But men were uncertain.
The fearful end of his father must have embittered him. The rebels
were, of course, drastically punished. Eight hundred more arrests
were made. Sophia Perovskaia, the wonderful woman of those bloody
days, and four others were executed. There is a grounded suspicion
that they were first tortured. Another woman was condemned, but
she was pregnant, and her sentence was changed to exile.

It is thought by many that an injudicious step taken by the
revolutionaries helped to fix the Tsar’s plan. They somehow got into his
hands a long letter or manifesto, in which, while pleading for reform,
they very plainly held a sword over his head; and their demands were not
at all moderate. I doubt if Alexander III ever hesitated. His strong and
narrow mind and soldierly attitude disposed him to “enforce discipline.”
Pobiedonostseff was soon at his side. He was Procurator of the Holy
Synod (since the preceding year). When Melikoff’s scheme was
brought forward for discussion he bitterly opposed it, and predicted
that it would ruin Russia. He was now a Russophile of the narrowest and
most fanatical description. Alexander leaned to that side. The German
Emperor had, he said, warned his father against making any concessions
to constitutionalism. The “Holy League”--a fanatical Russophile society
led by the Grand Duke Vladimir--pressed for coercion.

Out of the struggle there emerged at last (on April 29th) the new Tsar’s
message to his people. It was probably written by Pobiedonostseff. In it
Alexander firmly contended that the autocracy was of divine origin, and
he would protect it against all encroachments. But the reforms granted
by his father would not be withdrawn. Education, popular councils,
municipal institutions, and so on, were to be maintained. The people
were to be admitted to some share in the management of the Empire’s
affairs. That was to be the note of the new reign: something more
moderate than Pobiedonostseff and less “advanced” than Melikoff.

Melikoff resigned, and his place as Minister of the Interior was taken
by General Ignatieff, a man of moderate conservative views, or a man who
at least felt the need of concessions. On the one hand he looked with
criminal toleration upon the massacres of the Jews which now broke out
all over Russia. On the other he advised the Tsar that large reforms
were needed. The peasants were assisted in paying off the crippling
annual interest on their “emancipation.” Popular councils were set up
in Poland, Siberia, and the Baltic provinces, which had not hitherto
had them. Above all he devised, and imposed upon the Tsar, a feeble
pretence of a national parliament. Members of the provincial
councils--“informed men,” as they were diplomatically called--were
gathered into a deliberating assembly at St. Petersburg, and it was
through them that the reforms were gradually drafted. There was an
improvement in the harsh manner of collecting the taxes, and the
burden was shifted a little more on to the shoulders of the wealthy.
Ranks were opened for the peasants.

The conservatives stormed the Tsar with protests against these dangerous
concessions, and in the spring of 1882 General Ignatieff was forced to
retire. His place was taken by Count Dmitri Tolstoi, one of the men of
the last reign whom liberals hated above all others. He had been the
Minister of Education during the late Tsar’s drastic restriction of the
schools and universities. He and Pobiedonostseff and a few other rabid
Slavophiles now closed round Alexander III and dictated the policy of
his reign. That policy was one of, at home, unswerving, unscrupulous,
unmerciful Russification; that is to say, complete obliteration of all
criticism of the autocracy in native Russia and all religious or racial
characters in the subject-provinces of alien race or religion. Abroad,
the policy was naturally Pan-Slav, aggressive, imperialistic; but here
the Emperor and his limited resources curbed the fanatics, so that the
reign passed without a war. Russia was orientated for the final struggle
in the next reign. For the reign of Alexander we need only glance at the
various branches of the machinery of despotism which was created for the
defence of the Romanoffs.

Education was the great source of evil, but in a world where education
was now adopted as an elementary principle of civilisation it was no
longer possible to return to the absolute illiteracy of the Middle Ages.
A compromise was found in the easy distinction between sound and unsound
education. The figures of educational progress during the reign of
Alexander III are at first sight impressive. In 1877 the eight
universities had had 5629 students: in 1886 the number had arisen to
14,000. In the same period the number of high schools rose from 200 to
about a thousand: the number of elementary schools from 25,077 to
35,517. There were now, in all, more than two million pupils in the
elementary schools of the Empire. It should be added that the population
of the Empire was now 113,000,000; that most of the schools were
founded, independently of St. Petersburg, by the zealous
Zemstvos; and that very many of them were mere huts or sheds with
ludicrously incompetent teachers.

Count Tolstoi, having been for sixteen years Minister of Education,
controlled this department in the interest of the Slavophiles and
imperialists. Pobiedonostseff, indeed, wanted to have all the elementary
schools put under the control of the Holy Synod, or under the clergy. I
have said little about the Russian Church during this period for a
reason which will be understood. It was a mere docile instrument of the
dynasty. Its ordinary priests were rough, ignorant men, little superior
to the peasants themselves. Its higher clergy murmured not one single
syllable at the cruelty, just as they had murmured none at the earlier
vices, of the Romanoffs.

The Zemstvos, however, in most cases refused to hand over their schools,
and the secular part of the government had neither the funds to devote
to the work nor the wish to have serious trouble with the Zemstvos. We
shall see that they found it easier to capture the Zemstvos themselves
and control their action. The Holy Synod also began the policy of
creating religious schools in opposition to those of the Zemstvos, and
securing imperial favour for these nurseries of docility. The high
schools were re-modelled, and were now forbidden by law to admit the
children of the poorer types of workers. Some technical improvements
were made in them, but the general effect was to reduce the stimulating
influence of the education. The universities were more drastically
controlled. No students’ societies were permitted, and the
curriculum was carefully purged. Inspectors were attached to them, and
the grant of scholarships was made to depend upon the reports of these
spies of orthodoxy. There were serious riots of the students in 1882 and
1887, but the energy of the reactionary officials gradually drove
professors into silence or exile and pupils into subjection.

The press was in 1882 controlled by “temporary rules,” which proved to
have a long duration. If a journal had, after three warnings, incurred
suspension, it must, at the expiration of the term, henceforward submit
a copy of the next day’s issue to the censors before eleven at night.
This effectively silenced the majority of the liberal periodicals, and
eviscerated the others. When some tried to evade the gag by using
language of a veiled or ambiguous character, a junta of four Ministers
was empowered to suppress any periodical which seemed to them to have a
mischievous tendency. By these and other means progressive literature
was extinguished. The few revolutionaries continued, of course, to
establish private presses, which were constantly detected and the
workers sent to Siberia or the mines, but the work of political
education was generally suspended.

The political scheme which had been set up was similarly “revised.” The
Zemstvos were, as I said, stubborn. Even the nobles were jealous of
their local powers, and at first antagonistic to the new regime. Large
numbers of them were won by stories of dangerous tendencies amongst the
peasantry. It is said that in their attacks upon the Jews the people had
said: “We will make our breakfast of the Jews, our dinner of the
landowners, and our supper of the priests.” Priests and nobles fell into
line with the ministers. In 1889 and 1890 the nobles were given a
preponderating influence over the other representatives in the Zemstvos.
They became little more than assemblies of loyal land-owners, open to
the direct influence of the government. The Mir was similarly enfeebled,
and lost its popular representative value.

The judicial system was correspondingly modified. Public executions were
abandoned, in the spirit of the age, and some other improvements were
introduced. But the general scheme set up by Alexander II had been too
grossly ignored in the later years of that monarch, and it was now
modified by decree. The jury-system was reduced; the justices of the
peace abolished. Petty cases fell back to the reorganised Zemstvos.

The financial system, on the other hand, remained for many years under
the control of an enlightened minister, Bunge, and was greatly improved.
Finance was in any case a department into which it was profitable to
admit modern science. The coinage was improved, and more banks were
established. Home-industry was fostered, and the great extension of the
Empire in Asia opened new markets. Railways were multiplied, and in 1891
the Grand Duke Nicholas opened the terminal station of the proposed
Trans-Siberian railway at Vladivostock. Russia had already made
commercial treaties with Korea and Japan. We will return presently to
this dangerous extension of Russian ambition.

Most important and characteristic of all was the process of
Russification in which all these engines of reaction were combined. One
can understand the fascination of the Slavophile dream as it was formed
in the mind of honest conservatives. Every concession made in the
western democracies and limited monarchies had led to further demands.
Napoleon III had lost his throne. The Papacy had lost its temporal
power. William I and Bismarck were struggling against a portentous
growth of Socialism. France was rapidly shedding its religion. Even in
England the republican movement was at that time (the eighties) strong,
and lower depths of radicalism were disclosed every decade. Liberalism,
either in religion or politics, was evidently a slope; you could not
remain long elsewhere than at the top or the bottom. So Russia
must be made thoroughly, homogeneously autocratic and religious. In
spite of the well-known facts of Russian history the Church agreed
warmly with the Romanoffs that the autocracy was divinely appointed. If
all could be made docile to the Church, the autocracy would have an
easier task.

So began the process of Russification which passed with the brutality of
a steam-roller over every sect or fragment of the nation that was not
Russian in creed and dynastic in politics. The Jews formed the gravest
problem. Long experience had shown that no power on earth could erase
the religious and racial peculiarities of the Jew, yet there were nearly
five million Jews in the Russian Empire. Their intelligence and skill in
trade were but additional grievances. There were, even then, parts of
Russia in which the Jews showed that, under proper treatment, they were
as capable as any of settling upon the soil, but as a rule they avoided
agriculture. The slightest relaxation of pressure allowed them to pour
into a city or even a district, and as traders and money-lenders they
soon had the poor and thriftless Russians in their power. Hence, in
great measure, the readiness of the people to rise against them, which
was gradually exploited rather than checked from St. Petersburg.

The first procedure of the reactionary ministers was to overlook the
massacres which took place from the beginning of the rule of Alexander
III. Presently, a series of “temporary rules” were issued
against them. Even in the Pale of Settlement they were compelled to live
in the towns and were forbidden to purchase real estate in the country.
In 1888 they were ordered to go back to the place in which they had
lived before the year 1882. About a million and a half of the Jews were
affected by this rule, and the chaotic abandonment of their several
businesses and properties cast large numbers of them into deep and
undeserved poverty. Vast aggregations of them, growing at a prodigious
rate on account of their high fertility, huddled together in the towns
of the Pale, and lived in great privation. In 1891 a new application of
the rules exiled and ruined seventeen thousand Jewish artisans of
Moscow.

 [IMAGE: img348.jpg Tauride Palace/Session Chamber of the Duma]

Still more stupid, and hardly less cruel, was the restriction upon the
development of their ability. The civil service and the professions were
closed against them. They might not, without special license, have a
Christian servant, and notaries were forbidden to have Jewish clerks.
Their zeal for education was similarly repressed. In the universities
which were situated in the Pale Jewish students must not number more
than a tenth of the whole. At other provincial universities they must
not number more than five per cent.; at the metropolitan universities
not more than two per cent. By these contemptuous repressive measures
the ignorant people were prepared for the pogroms which would disgrace
the reign of the last of the Romanoffs.

The Poles were the next most conspicuous victims of the Slavophile
policy. We saw that Alexander II had ordered the extinction of their
nationality, but a people with an acute memory of having been a great
civilisation at a time when the Russians were a disorderly mass of
semi-barbarians could not easily resign itself to obliteration. The
religious tradition here coincided with the national, as in Ireland (the
Poland of the west), and the priests generally fostered insurgence.
Alexander’s ruthless ministers had but to apply more stringently the
laws already in force against the Poles. From the University of Warsaw
to the smallest elementary school the teaching was entirely Russianised.
Even the Bank of Warsaw was suppressed, and Polish trade forced into a
branch of the Russian bank. There was a futile rising in 1885, but four
executions and two hundred arrests completed the work of “pacifying” the
country, or eliminating from it every man of spirit and courage. Even
Finland, which was still autonomous, had to complain to the Tsar of
encroachments upon the liberties which his father had sworn to respect.
In the other Baltic provinces the Russian roller was used as in Poland.

The dissenters and heretics of every kind in Russia itself were
similarly treated. To the tenacious dissenters of the last century or
two were now added sects like the Doukhobors and the followers of
Tolstoi, and upon these the Tsar’s ministers fell with particular
malevolence. Alexander was ignorant enough to believe quite sincerely in
the doctrines of the Orthodox Church, but he knew that these new sects
had more than a religious significance. Prayer-meetings were prohibited.
Even children were separated in some cases from their parents and forced
into the rigid Slavophile mould.

It will be understood, after this description of the machinery that was
set up by Tolstoi and Pobiedonostseff, that the chronicle of revolt in
the reign of Alexander II is comparatively slender. It is computed that
by the end of the reign there were about a hundred thousand rebels in
the jails, the mines, and the Siberian colonies, and to these one must
add the graves of the bolder spirits and the large numbers of Russians
who sought abroad the liberty that had died in Russia. Men still risked
their lives in printing and disseminating the new ideas, but as the long
reign wore on, and tyranny was still enthroned, the open spurts of
defiance grew less in number. The revolutionaries and liberals felt
that, if their race was not to be extinguished, as the reactionaries
desired, the work must proceed in different form. We shall see in the
next and final chapter how it proceeded until, after further bloody
revolts against the intolerable tyranny, it succeeded in awakening the
people and shaking the Romanoffs from their throne.

It remains to see how the Pan-Slav movement, the twin-brother of the
Slavophile philosophy, also prepared the way for the next reign. We have
seen how every expansion of Russia, every enlargement of its stupendous
population and therefore ultimate resources, alarmed some other European
Power. Russia now made new advances and opened the way for fresh
conflicts. It had reached the eastern coast of Asia. Now it began its
interference in Korea and attracted the attention of Japan. It spread
south toward India and still further alarmed England. Journals of the
imperialist school at St. Petersburg openly boasted that their armies
were beating a path to the Indian Ocean, and it may be said in
justification of England’s long distrust of Russia that the Romanoffs
wholly encouraged this dream until an Asiatic Power proved to them that
Asia was not the helpless world they had imagined. When the southern
limit of Asiatic Russia was extended until it came, at certain points,
within a hundred and forty miles of India, when Russian agents swarmed
in Afghanistan, it was not unnatural that London should be nervous.
Alexander III, however, took a keen personal interest in foreign
affairs, and he succeeded in averting serious trouble with England.

Still more dangerous to the peace of the world was the ambition of the
Pan-Slavs to overrun the Balkans. Our generation is familiar enough with
the philosophy in the form of Pan-Germanism, and from this the mood of
Russia in the days of Alexander III will be understood. The creed of the
Pan-Slavs was a mixture of commercial greed, imperialistic ambition, the
impulses of soldiers to use their weapons, and the desire of priests to
enlarge their Church. As the little peoples of the Balkans were largely
Slav--though the Bulgars are as much Asiatic as Slav, and the Rumans
take more pride in their remote descent from the Romans--it was
inevitable that, in spite of the jealous watchfulness of all the Great
Powers of Europe, the new imperialists of St. Petersburg should push
their work in the Balkans.

There is this almost single advantage in the reign of Alexander III that
he distrusted Germany and did not allow his ambitious ministers to
embroil the country in war. Bismarck would like to see Russia weakened,
as it periodically was, by war, and there seemed to be every prospect of
war over the Balkan peoples. Behind the specious plea of liberating
Christians from the brutality of the Turk and conveying civilisation to
the backward peoples of the Balkans there was at that time, as in our
own days, a dual rivalry. Austria and the Papacy had an ambition which
was directly opposed to the ambition of the statesmen and priests of St.
Petersburg. The path to the Mediterranean and the commercial advantage
of exploiting the Balkan peoples were not more eagerly sought by
politicians and merchants than the religious allegiance of the
independent Balkan Churches was sought by the Vatican and the Holy
Synod.

Russia pushed its ambition in Bulgaria--Austria in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, which had been entrusted to its “protection.” But the
little Balkan peoples were now almost entirely awake to the designs of
the ministers of Alexander III. The Tsar said on one occasion that the
King of Montenegro was the only friend he had in Europe. The Serbs and
Rumans drew nearer to Austria, the Bulgars began to resent the presence
amongst them of so many officers of the Russian army and agents of the
Russian Government. After the Bulgar revolution of 1885 there seemed to
be grave prospect of a war between Austria and Russia. But Alexander was
made sensible of the disgusting duplicity with which Bismarck tried to
draw Russia into dangerous waters in the south, and he withdrew his
officers from Bulgaria. He complained to the German Emperor of the
procedure of the Chancellor, but he maintained the commercial alliance
with Germany and the ostensibly friendly relations.

Out of this rivalry of interests and clash of intrigue, in which
Alexander III acted with caution and shrewdness, there gradually emerged
the set of alliances which would one day deluge Europe with blood.
Germany and Austria made a common lot of their interests and drew
together. Italy, jealous of the French support of the Papacy and won by
the deceitful promises of Germany, joined them and formed the Triple
Alliance. Russia could no longer remain isolated and Alexander III
slowly and reluctantly overcame his imperial dislike of the French
Republic. Little acts of mutual courtesy led up to the floating of a
large loan in France in 1887. The financial link with Germany was almost
severed. In the following year a Russian representative was appointed to
the Vatican. In 1890 a large French fleet appeared at Cronstadt, and was
boisterously welcomed. In 1893, the year before the death of Alexander,
a commercial treaty with France was signed.

Thus in both domestic and foreign policy the reign of Alexander III was
one of preparation for the final chapter of the romance of the
Romanoffs. It created at home a machinery of despotism which would prove
so heavy that it roused the very people whom it was designed to
suppress. Abroad it entered upon imperialistic ventures which would lead
to wars that would expose the disgusting growth of corruption under the
shelter of the universal censorship. Alexander III died in 1894
(November 1st), and left to the last of his line a country which he had
apparently pacified. He was honest in his creed of orthodoxy and
autocracy, though we will not suppose that he was insensible of its
profit to himself and his family; but he had not the intelligence to see
that such an anachronism as his mediæval suppression of a
people’s sentiments could not live in the atmosphere of the end of
the nineteenth century.



 CHAPTER XVI
 THE LAST OF THE ROMANOFFS

THE crowning act of the drama of the Romanoffs has a peculiar irony. One
could well imagine a Romanoff of the seventeenth or eighteenth century
making a ferocious struggle against the democratic forces which now
threatened the autocracy. For those older monarchs power had been a
means of obtaining wealth, of enlarging their individual pleasures to
royal or imperial proportions, and they would use all the machinery of
despotism to maintain their splendid privileges. But in proportion as
the democratic menace grew in the nineteenth century the voluptuous
selfishness of the Russian monarchs diminished. The serious, almost
ascetic, standard set up by Alexander I lingered in the imperial
palaces, and it seemed that the less personal gratification the monarch
received from his autocratic power the more resolutely he fought to
retain it. The last of the Romanoffs was one of the most sober and
industrious of his line; and his reign was disgraced by a more bloody
and cruel coercion than had reddened the reign of any of his predecessors.

Nicholas II, son of Alexander III and Princess Dagmar of Denmark, is one
of those tantalising personalities whom one knows to be in themselves
far removed from subtlety, yet whom one cannot honestly pretend to
understand. He came to the throne an unknown man, eagerly scrutinised by
every moderate reformer in Russia. He departs from it with his
personality and actions still largely enveloped in mystery. This
obscurity is, as I said, not due to any depth or subtlety in the mind of
the Tsar; it is due rather to the weakness of his character. Two sets of
influences surrounded him, bending to their will his frail personality
and substituting their cupidity or prejudice for his native impulses.
The inner circle was that of his family, in which his mother and uncles
were the leading and most mischievous figures. The outer circle was the
ring of adventurers or reactionaries whom the strength of his older
relatives or the febrility of his own character invested successively
with ministerial power. Beyond these, again, were the religious
charlatans who at times preyed upon the superstition of the Tsar and
Tsarina, the great body of ecclesiastical and other officers whose
interest it was to maintain the existing system, and the doctrinaire
conservatives who, with purblind eyes, insisted upon the isolation of
Russia from the progress of the world. Through this maze of intrigue and
influence it is difficult to reach the personality of Nicholas II with
confidence, and the fierce partisianship of writers on both sides in the
great struggle increases our task of disentangling the precise parts in
the final catastrophe.

It seems, however, to be an error to regard the last of the Romanoffs as
a mere puppet, a tearful and hysterical implement, of the reactionary
influences which surrounded him. Nicholas had not the robustness of his
father, whose dwarf intellect had been lodged in the frame of a Russian
giant, but he was stronger than many literary portraits of him suggest
to us. His education had been severely controlled. Distinguished experts
had taught him those branches of culture--law, history, and political
economy--which were deemed necessary in a successor of Alexander III,
and a rigorous physical training had braced the comparative feebleness
of his person. He swam and rowed with skill, he played tennis and
hunted, and throughout his reign he loved a long walk, often of ten or
fifteen miles, and would at times burden himself with all the equipment
of a common infantryman. It is said that the sabre-cut on the head which
he received from a Japanese fanatic in 1891, when he made a tour of the
Empire and further Asia, injured his brain and led to nervous
instability; but this is one of the many statements of revolutionary
writers which have not been checked by sober criticism. He came to the
throne in 1894, a cool, self-possessed, carefully-educated young man of
twenty-six, and some hope was excited in the breast of moderate Russian
liberalism.

To this it may be added that throughout his reign Nicholas II adhered to
a sober and industrious standard of life. Here, indeed, the writers of
the opposing schools begin to differ. That he was a man of comparatively
simple and sober tastes none disputes. His table was temperate and
conspicuous for old Russian dishes. He spent his leisure in the domestic
circle, playing dominoes or billiards in the metropolitan palaces,
sharing walks or rides or sails with his family in the provinces. He
opened every day with religious observances, had the family ikons
brought on voyages, and rigorously kept the fasts of the Church.

But his industry and attention to affairs are differently represented.
Conservatives picture him a model of severe self-sacrifice. He worked,
they say, without secretaries, ten or twelve hours every day. He
minutely studied and annotated every document. He wore his pencil to the
stump--the conservative pen records this with awed amazement--and then
gave the stump gravely to his son. One imagines him relaxing from the
cares of Empire but for an hour in the evening. The revolutionary
writers, however, depict him differently. They represent that he
attended impatiently to serious affairs and spent an abnormal proportion
of the day in the petty amusements of the domestic circle. The truth
lies between the extremes. Nicholas II was industrious, and he attempted
to discharge his functions very seriously within the limits of his
narrow and mediocre conceptions.

His people were not long in doubt as to the nature of his ideal. It was
the ideal which each Romanoff of the century had naively conceived
afresh; a complete retention of the autocracy coupled with a benevolent
intention to help his people. On the day of his father’s death Nicholas
issued a manifesto in which he promised to promote “the progress and
peaceful glory of his dear Russia and the happiness of his faithful
subjects.” To the deputies who came to congratulate him he said that--as
his foreign minister, M. de Giers, also assured foreign Powers--he would
maintain his father’s policy. Plainly the young Emperor approached his
task with the customary confidence of youth. He would avoid the error of
his predecessors and, by wise moderation, disarm the malcontents and
sustain a benevolent despotism.

But Nicholas soon discovered that the last reign still survived in such
power as to admit no new experiments. His mother, the Dowager-Empress,
was a harsh and arrogant woman, uniting to her political ignorance and
incompetence a fierce resolution to have her husband’s policy
sustained. Nicholas’s uncles, the Grand Dukes Sergius and
Alexander, were of the same harshly despotic temper, and
Pobiedonostseff, the head of the Holy Synod, was the enthusiastic
supporter of their wishes. These four, with the reactionary ministers
Plehve, Muravieff, and Brezobrazoff (later Admiral Alexieff and others),
whom they gradually discovered and promoted, formed what came to be
known as the “Immortal Seven,” the caucus which led the
dynasty to its destruction.

Nicholas was not married at the time of his accession. It was not until
November that he married Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, who entered
the Orthodox Church and adopted the name of Alexandra Feodorovna. It is
said that at the last moment the Dowager-Empress took a violent dislike
to her and enlivened the palace with lamentable exhibitions of her
violent temper. It is at least clear that in the earlier years the
Tsarina had no influence. Only in the last phase did she, by her
pro-German leanings and her ignorant susceptibility to the intrigues of
religious adventurers, contribute to the downfall of the monarchy.

Nicholas was crowned at Moscow on May 26th, 1895, and a terrible
catastrophe clouded the very opening of his reign. Hundreds of thousands
of peasants flocked to Moscow for the festivity, and for the presents
which were promised them, and they spent the night packed into the field
of Khodynski. A panic arose amongst them, and about a thousand of
them--some say several thousand--were trodden under foot or
cast into the ditch and perished. It was a bad beginning, and the Tsar
soon made matters worse. In July nearly two hundred delegations brought
to his palace the congratulations of every class of his people, and
faint and respectful suggestions of reform were inserted in the bouquets
of traditional compliment. From the province of Tver, especially, came a
demand for liberal institutions, and the Emperor received it with a
smiling disdain which showed how little he understood his country. These
were “foolish dreams,” he said; he would devote all his
strength to the welfare of his country, but he would, “with equal
firmness, maintain the autocracy.”

A few reforms were introduced. Count de Witte fought his way to the head
of the Treasury and improved the finances. The immense flow of paper
money was checked, and gold was accumulated at the banks or put into
circulation. Ukases were passed which directed the building of model
houses for the workers, and regulated to some extent their condition in
the growing industries of Russia. New railways were built and canals
projected. The army was partly reorganised; the administrative and
judiciary institutions of the Empire extended to Siberia, the
development of which was energetically pushed; a measure to give
separated married women the control of their property was passed;
education was further enforced, though in this respect the reform was
weakened or undone by the desperate efforts of the clergy to wrest the
elementary schools from the Zemstvos.

These reforms, however, like those of the preceding reigns, were trivial
in comparison with the mighty needs of Russia, and it was now felt by
all but the incurable conservatives and the parasites of the autocracy
that self-government, through popular institutions, was the first and
essential condition of reform. On this issue the dynasty, or the
misguided group who undertook to guide its fortunes, staked its
existence. How far any of the reactionaries really believed that the
autocracy was for the welfare of the Russian people it is not our place
to consider here. The antagonistic forces moved slowly toward the field
of battle.

With the general policy and personal adventures of Nicholas II I am not
concerned. The whole interest of the story is now concentrated in the
growth of the conflict which will presently put an end to the Romanoffs.
It suffices to say that Russophilism and Pan-Slavism continued to act
together, and were equally responsible for the fall of the dynasty.
Nicholas II professed a humane dislike of the coercive policy of his
father, and in some respects, in the early years, the zeal of officials
in persecuting dissenters was moderated. But the facts of the entire reign
are within the memory of my readers and their ghastly inconsistence with
this humane profession need scarcely be emphasised. Never since the
Middle Ages had the Jews suffered so brutally at the hands of their
Christian masters. Unscrupulous officials and bodies of ignorant men
like the “Black Hundreds” soon learned that massacre and pillage of the
Jews were looked upon with favour at the palace, and the repeated
“pogroms” are in themselves an indelible disgrace upon the name of
Nicholas II. The Russianisation of the Poles--for which Russia pays
heavily to-day--and the Lithuanians was maintained with all the earlier
brutality, and in regard to the Finns Nicholas II incurred a peculiar
stigma. He had at his accession sworn to respect the rights and the
constitution of the Finns, but before long his officials tore up his
oath and began to strip the vigorous little people of its nationality.
Hardly a year of the Tsar’s reign passed without some callous violation
of his solemn promise, done with his express authority. The whole Empire
must, in spite of every obligation, be squeezed into the Russian mould.
The only extenuating feature of this section of the Tsar’s work that one
can suggest is that the Russian people generally were in accord with
this harsh and unjust procedure.

The imperialistic tendency which led to this injustice equally shaped
the disastrous foreign policy of Nicholas II. There can be little doubt
that the Tsar desired a continuance of the peace which Russia had
enjoyed during his father’s reign, and for my part I am ready to
recognise his sincerity in issuing a summons to a Peace Congress (August
24th, 1898), the aims of which Nicholas defined in a personal letter
(January 11th, 1899). It was, as we now know, Germany which chiefly
frustrated that well-meant effort. The Tsar remained friendly with
Germany, which then wavered between a Russian and an English
_entente_, while further strengthening his alliance with France.

But the Tsar’s desire of peace was, from the general practical point of
view, rendered nugatory by his imperialistic policy. In the Balkans he
maintained that policy of secret and subtle infiltration which prepared
the way for a conflict with Austria. Alexander III had in effect retired
from the Balkans, disgusted at the ingratitude of the principalities
Russia had helped to set up. Nicholas II resumed the policy of disguised
penetration, and it is not too much to say that the southern Slavs felt
almost as much apprehension at the shadow of Russia as at the
encroachments of Austria. It was, however, the imperialist adventures in
the Far East which contained the gravest danger and were least
respectable in principle.

It was entirely natural that Russia should spread along its
Trans-Siberian line, develop its vast domains in Asia, and seek ice-free
ports on the eastern coast. This national ambition was, however,
complicated by sordid speculations on the part of men and women who,
directly or indirectly, had influence over the Tsar. Revolutionary
writers say that the Dowager-Empress herself speculated heavily in
Asiatic properties, and at least it may be regarded as certain that the
Grand Dukes and adherents of the court sought fortune in that direction.
From Siberia these cupidities reached out toward Manchuria and Korea,
and had large and vague designs upon helpless China. Russia--so the
formula ran--was the heir of Dchingis Khan and Timur. It had a
“divine mission” to impose its Kultur upon Asia. The very
thin strain of Tatar blood in the veins of Russia was at length
discovered to have some value.

 [IMAGE: img366.jpg The Tsarina Alexandra]

The Chino-Japanese War occurred in the first year of the reign of
Nicholas II, and the rise of an Asiatic power in the path of Russian
ambition caused a momentary concern. Japan must be promptly checked, and
at the close of the war Russia bluntly refused to allow Japan to occupy
any of the territory it had seized. Germany astutely watched and
fostered the dangerous adventure which diverted Russia from Europe to
the Far East. Under cover of its supposed protection of China, Russia
then established itself in Manchuria, secured (with money borrowed from
France and England) a financial hold on China, and in 1898 obtained a
long lease of Port Arthur and Talienwan. The cold anger of the Japanese
at this piece of perfidy was little disguised, and presently Russia was
requested to carry out its promise to evacuate Manchuria. From its new
ports, it was plain to all, Russia would spread to Korea. The other
European Powers now joined in the protest of Japan, and Russia sought to
gain time by long negotiations, while it pressed the development of Port
Arthur and Dalny. These devices Japan, in 1904, sternly cut short by
making war.

The documentary evidence in regard to those aspects of the
Russo-Japanese War which concern us here is in the same unsatisfactory
condition as so much of the evidence on which we must rely in this
chapter. It awaits the impartial sifting of history. The suppression of
truth in Russia throughout the reign of Nicholas II had the inevitable
effect of provoking abroad a stream of something more than the truth.
Writers and orators of revolutionary parties do not usually make calm
and conscientious reflection on the statements they repeat, and in every
country of the world the Russian writers found a large public eager to
hear sensational stories about the court and the bureaucracy. It is at
present entirely impossible to select with any confidence the reliable
statements from the mass of legends which were published in Europe and
America by the critics of the dynasty. Their fellows in Russia were, we
shall see, being butchered in thousands, and were in tens of thousands
suffering an agony which they often terminated by suicide; and, on the
other hand, many of the chief agents of this bloody system were
undoubtedly corrupt adventurers or cynical egoists. In the vast
anti-Romanoff literature, therefore, we cannot look for judicious
impartiality, and if the reader misses from this chapter many a
picturesque legend which he has read in the scorching pages of
revolutionary writers he must not be surprised. The history of that
appalling reign is still to be written.

As far as the Russo-Japanese War is concerned we need not hesitate to
admit three points. The first is that the Tsar, if not some of his
ministers, sincerely believed that the little nation of the Far East
would never have the audacity to fight mighty Russia; and that Germany
encouraged the Russian court in this view. Japan was bluffing, the Tsar
was assured, and he might pursue his eastern extension under cover of a
hollow and dilatory diplomatic negotiation. The second clear point is
that this eastern extension of Russia was very largely due to the
corrupt and selfish ambitions of influential individuals. Stories about
the investments of the Dowager-Empress or the Grand Dukes or other
persons of the Tsar’s circle may or may not be true. There is fair
evidence that the speculative fever penetrated the court. In any case
the “divine mission” of Russia in the Far East was as hollow
a pretence as the divine mission of Germany in the west in 1914. The
third established point, and the one of most importance for our purpose,
is that members of the imperial family and servants of the reactionary
regime made vast sums of money by a corrupt diversion of goods and funds
from the purposes of war to their private purses.

The knowledge of these facts came to thoughtful people in Russia as the
ignominious campaign dragged on from month to month. Public opinion,
startled by the success of what they had been taught to regard as a
tribe of “monkeys” against their great army, looked for hidden reasons
of Russia’s failure, and they were brought to light. It was known that
aristocratic officers gambled and rioted in the Asiatic towns; it was
known that trained regiments of the regular army were kept at home to
coerce Russia while crowds of reservists were hurried out to meet the
deadly Japanese fire; it was known that the large sums extorted from the
people for the prosecution of the war were to a great extent diverted;
it was known that Count de Witte and Count Lamsdorff had tried to avert
war, and that Manchurian affairs had then been entrusted to a favourite
of the palace-clique, Admiral Alexieff. Before the war was half over the
revolution was again aflame in Russia, and it grew daily.

We are told by writers who seem to have had the confidence of the
revolutionaries that the complete suppression of overt criticism by
Alexander III and his son had led to the formation of a new and very
powerful secret movement. It had branches in all parts of Russia, and it
is said to have had as many as three million members in the year 1904.
Twelve men of distinguished ability directed its propaganda, and many
wealthy Russians, disgusted at or injured by the atrocious system which
Nicholas II maintained, devoted their whole fortunes to its work. Many
of the stories told of its secret action are melodramatic and
improbable, but it cannot be doubted that a vast and well-organised
movement existed, not unlike the secret republican organisation which
was then being formed in Portugal. The Russian movement, however, was
not definitely republican. It aimed at converting the Tsar, under
pressure of his people, to constitutional views. It resented and
despised the turbulent movements of the students and Socialists, and it
countenanced assassination only in very grave and carefully-selected
cases. We are told that its agents repeatedly placed on the Tsar’s desk
letters in which the situation was fully described and Nicholas was
urged to make peace with his people by granting a constitution and
casting off the influence of the Dowager-Empress.

The early agitation was crushed with the customary brutality. One of the
most repulsive adventurers of the time, Plehve, had become Minister of
the Interior, and under his genial lead the police and magistrates fell
upon every suspicion of revolt. Over the greater part of Russia the
protection of civil law had been virtually suspended since 1881. Under
what was called “The Regulation for Reinforced Protection” suspects
might be at any time arrested and imprisoned, journals suppressed, the
civil courts entirely ignored. In the year 1903 nearly 400 men and women
had been arrested under this barbarous system, and it was estimated that
there were already more than 100,000 in the jails of Russia and in
Siberia. The work had continued, however, and the revolutionaries boast
that in the very year before the war, the year when they seemed to be
feeblest, they circulated two million pamphlets among the Russian people.
As the agitation grew with the war, Plehve retorted with increased
savagery; and on July 28th (1904), he was, in spite of his extraordinary
precautions, assassinated. The murderer, Sazonoff, was sentenced only to
twenty years’ imprisonment, and Nicholas reduced this to fourteen years.
The revolutionaries claim that they warned the Tsar that he answered
with his life for the life of Sazonoff. It was, at all events, made
plain to the Tsar by the press of Europe that his system of ruling was
regarded as barbarous.

A more moderate man, or one who claimed at least to have some sympathy
with liberalism, Prince Sviatopolk-Mirski, was put in charge of the
ministry of the interior, and the struggle passed to a new phase. On
November 19th the police of St. Petersburg permitted a large meeting of
members of the provincial Zemstvos, and a deputation of these was
allowed to see Prince Mirski. They demanded free parliamentary
institutions and manhood suffrage, and the Prince undertook to lay their
demands before the Tsar. It is reported that the Dowager-Empress, the
Grand Dukes, and the reactionary ministers violently opposed any
concession, and we must assume both that they would be consulted and
that they would give this advice. The Tsar was nervous and timorous,
physically and mentally unequal to the great burden which now lay upon
him. On December 12th he issued a ukase in which he promised reforms,
but he described the demands of the representatives of the Zemstvos as
“inadmissible” and inconsistent with “the fundamental laws of the
Empire.” The bulk of his people were, he said, “true to the old
foundations of the State-organisation,” and he would protect them from
the intrigues of agitators.

The battle continued. A great meeting at St. Petersburg was addressed
openly by writers and scholars of distinction, and amongst the crowd the
cry “Down with the Autocracy” was heard. Petitions and demands for
representative institutions rained upon the Tsar from all classes of
his subjects. Strikes and riots filled the daily press. On January 9th
the notorious Father Gapon led 300,000 workers to the Winter Palace, to
lay their grievances before the “Little Father,” and before evening the
snows of St. Petersburg were stained with the blood of thousands. There
were spurts of revolt at Kichineff, Odessa, Moscow, and even Kronstadt.

On February 4th the Grand Duke Sergius, the most corrupt of the
reactionaries, was assassinated. Prince Mirski resigned and was
succeeded by Bulygin. Before the new minister was established, the Tsar
issued a new ukase affirming the autocratic principle, but Bulygin
insisted that he should modify this act of mad defiance, dictated by the
palace-clique, by issuing on the same day a promise to convoke a
consultative assembly of representatives of the people. He appointed a
commission of inquiry, and in reply to a deputation from a second
conference of the Zemstvos he announced that a National Assembly would
soon be granted. The long-expected ukase appeared on May 10th. It opened
on a note of repentance:

“A State cannot be solid unless it holds as sacred the traditions
of the past. We have failed in this, and God has punished us. The
sovereignty of ancient Russia was indissolubly bound up with ‘the
voice of the land,’ with the representatives of the people
assembled in council.”

For the first time the Romanoffs perceived that, centuries before their
dynasty was cradled, Russia had had a past, and a democratic past.

But the project of the new assembly, the first Duma, turned this avowal
into derision. The business of the representatives of the people was
merely to examine proposals which would be laid before the Imperial
Council: the Tsar alone could initiate and pass legislation. By further
regulations, in fact, the members of the Duma were put at the mercy of
the conservative Senate. The autocracy was maintained in all its
mediævalism. Liberals and radicals now united in a fierce demand of
reform. Russia was paralysed by a general strike and the suspension of
traffic. More than a million workers were on strike. In a momentary
panic the Tsar directed Count de Witte to draw up a list of reforms, and
on October 30th (1905) he issued the famous ukase which has since given
a name to the vast body of moderate Russian reformers (the
“Octobrists”). He would grant manhood suffrage, real national
representation, freedom of speech and religion, and so on. As usual, the
first breath of liberty let loose a passion of discussion.
The radicals and independents united to form the powerful body of the
Constitutional Democrats (the “Cadets,” or K.D.s). A council of labour
deputies was formed with the express purpose of holding the supreme
power when the Tsar had been deposed.

In brief, Russia was seen aflame with revolution. There were mutinies in
the fleet at Kronstadt and at Sevastopol, and the audacity of the more
radical elements led, at Moscow, to the futile and pathetic rebellion in
which large numbers of students lost their lives. The revolution was
premature. The troops were unprepared for revolt on such an issue as the
constitution, and the “Black Bands” everywhere aided the police and
dipped their hands in the blood of Jews and radicals. The active
rebellion was truculently suppressed, and the jails were packed to
suffocation. His reactionary advisers urged the triumphant Tsar to
refuse all concessions, but the rumble of the more moderate malcontents
was still heard on every side, and the promise of some sort of national
assembly had to be carried out.

It was in these circumstances that, on May 10th, 1906, Nicholas opened
the first Duma. The name had been invented by the reforming minister of
Alexander I, Speranski, and it represented the measure of popular
representation which might have been regarded as satisfactory in those
semi-feudal days. For a civilisation of the twentieth century it was
ridiculously inadequate, and it soon proved only a channel for the
comparatively safe release of the boiling, sentiment which filled the
country. Before the Romanoff dynasty fell it was customary for polite
journalists and essayists to explain that the excesses of the radicals
frustrated the work of the new institution. It is unhappily true that
the left wing of every reform-movement uses a rhetoric which is little
in accord with its loud insistence on justice, but in this case even the
work of moderate members of the Duma was obnoxious to the authorities.
Day by day the state of the Russian jails, the gross conduct of police
and military authorities, and the barbarous practices of their
subordinates were brought to light. Week by week men waited, and waited
in vain, for the further instalments of reform which had been promised.

The Duma grew more and more vehement in its attacks upon the Government.
The Cadets formed the majority of its members, and they formulated their
demands for adult suffrage, real parliamentary institutions, the
abolition of capital punishment, a political amnesty, the suppression of
the Imperial Council, and the expropriation of the large land-owners.
Goremykin, a tool of the palace-clique which had put him in the place of
Count de Witte, refused to comply, and on July 23rd the Tsar dissolved
the Duma. The measure was a failure, and Goremykin had to surrender his
place to Stolypin. The ejected Cadets retired to Finland, and appealed
to the people to refuse to pay taxes or render military service: for
which, three years later, they were condemned to imprisonment and the
loss of their civil rights.

Stolypin had the ingenious idea of severing the great mass of the
peasants from the radicals by separate concessions, and in October and
November the Tsar appealed for their support. They were put on the same
footing as other classes in regard to the right of entering the public
service or schools, the issue of passports, and in rural elections. They
were released from obligatory residence in the district in which they
were registered, permitted to take away their share of the communal
property, and protected from punishment without trial. By these means,
and by tampering with the electoral law (which he dare not yet alter)
Stolypin secured a second Duma in which the Cadets were greatly reduced.
Instead of 185 seats they now had only 108. But they still formed the
largest party, and their leader Golovkin was President of the Duma. In
face of their demands the Tsar authorised Stolypin to offer the
crown-lands and imperial estates to be shared amongst the peasants, but
the radicals were not appeased, and on June 14th, three months after the
opening of the Duma, Stolypin demanded a secret session in order to
consider an indictment of the Social Democrats, whose number had
increased to 77 at the last election. Almost the whole of them were
charged with complicity in a plot to undermine the loyalty of the army
and navy.

The Duma was still overwhelmingly radical--a sufficient commentary on
the Tsar’s claim that the mass of his people clung to the old
traditions--and refused to lend itself to this manœuvre. Two days
later, June 16th, Nicholas again asserted his power and dissolved the
second Duma. It was, he declared, not representative of the “Russian
spirit” and would not support his government in suppressing disorder. To
make it more representative of this Russian spirit, which was supposed
to animate the bulk of the population, he narrowed the electoral
qualifications, in violation of his 1905 ukase, and reduced the
membership from 524 to 442. The Cadets now sank from 108 to 45, the
Socialists from 77 to 17. The conservatives rose from 60 to 100, and the
Octobrists from 31 to 110. Liberalism, of one shade or another, still
greatly outweighed conservatism even in this mangled representation of
the Russian people; and assassinations, strikes, and fiery rhetoric
impressed upon Europe the grievances of those who were excluded from
representation. In the year 1907 there were 627 executions, and about
70,000 were sent into exile. In 1908 there were 786 executions, and the
number of exiles rose to 180,000. The population of the jails of Russia
rose from 91,000 in the year 1904 to 174,000 in the year 1910.

This was the “comparative tranquillity” which the chroniclers of Russian
events ascribe to the country between 1907 and 1917. Quarterly notices
of the number of political executions were put into small type in
English and American journals, and from the sombre silence that brooded
over the land there issued at times the lurid message of assassination.
In 1909 occurred the astounding revelation of the secret-police spy and
professed Socialist Azeff, and it became known that outrages were
instigated by the police in order to strengthen their system. The former
head of the police had to be sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; the
head of the secret police of St. Petersburg was assassinated. In 1911
Stolypin was permitted by the Tsar to suspend the Imperial Council and
the Duma, so that he could avail himself of the clause of the
constitution which enabled him to pass laws while the councils were not
sitting; and on September 14th, while Nicholas sat in his box in the
opera at Kieff, he had the horror of witnessing the murder of his
complaisant minister. Still he clung to his poor rags of autocracy.
Still religious adventurers and spiritist mediums plied their lucratic
charlatanry in the palaces. Still the flower of the young generation
rotted in the overcrowded jails or languished in Siberia. The jails had
a “maximum accommodation” for 107,000 prisoners, and in 1910
about 180,000 men and women were crowded into them. Typhus flourished in
them. Suicides of prisoners rose to 160 in a single month. The most
brutal outrages were committed on young women and men.

These facts one learned, as I experienced at the time, by a laborious
comparison of the statements of little-read writers and statistics. To
the world at large a different picture was offered. Men were told how,
in 1906, a group of affrighted Polish peasants, headed by an abbess,
came to St. Petersburg to inquire if it was really true that (as zealous
Roman Catholic proselytisers had told them) the Tsar had made his
submission to the Pope. They saw a minister, on Easter morn, and to
their solemn salutation, “Christ is risen,” he blunderingly replied,
“Good Day”; and their hearts sank. But they also saw Nicholas, and to
their faltering religious salute he replied cheerfully, “In truth He is
risen,” and they fell sobbing at his feet. Or it was the festival of
Poltava in 1909, when Nicholas, seeing his carriage surrounded by a
dense throng of peasants, alighted and talked familiarly with them for
two hours. And there was the story of how at Christmas, 1912, when the
members of the Duma were presented to him, he summoned the shrinking
peasant-deputies from the last row and honoured them above the others.
Nicholas II knew quite well what was happening in Russia. His small mind
thought that tasting the food of soldiers and sailors--before a
camera--visiting the hospitals, and embracing carefully-selected
peasants would save the autocracy in the twentieth century.

The five-year period of the third Duma expired in 1912, and the new
election proved a victory for the conservatives. The Octobrists had
ventured to resist the demand of the clergy that the elementary schools
should be handed over to them, and the popes had fiercely and
unscrupulously canvassed the peasant-electors. Still, however, 285
Octobrists and other radicals faced the 155 members of the Right, and
small measures of reform had to be passed. They were inadequate, and the
year 1913 saw another great wave of disturbance. The number of strikers
rose to 460,000. At Kieff a great gathering of representatives of all
the towns of the Empire condemned the Government. The Octobrists united
with the other radicals of the Duma and, by 146 votes to 113 (many
abstaining) condemned the ministers for not proceeding in the path of
reform. But I need not run in detail over events which are still fresh
in the general memory. These brief notices will suffice to indicate that
the spirit of progress lived and grew in spite of every effort of
Nicholas II to strangle it.

The conflict entered upon its last stage. That Nicholas II wanted war,
however much he may have hoped to profit by the aid of France and
England, we have no reason whatever to believe. Nor is it possible as
yet to pass a sober opinion upon the charge that he intended, when the
war dragged, to make a separate peace with Germany. That his German wife
was won by the miserable adventurer Rasputin, and some of his ministers
by German bribery, seems clear enough; and, although he had been second
only to the Kaiser in the vigorous lead of his nation until the end of
1916, there is grave reason to think that he was then won by the prayers
of his family and intrigues of his ministers. But the Russian revolution
was not based on this theory as much as is generally believed. The mass
of the people were bewildered by the war, and have not since shown any
great zeal to prosecute it. The educated malcontents were, as we saw,
thoroughly organised and ready to grasp any pretext for a successful
revolution. Only a minority of military men and liberal politicians were
essentially moved by the failure of the dynasty to arm Russia
efficiently and prosecute the war.

The food-supply was the immediate ground of the revolution. On February
8th, when the five-year period of the Duma of 1912 approached its term,
the Tsar was urged to extend its life, as was done in other countries.
The Tsar refused, and he spoke of elections in the coming fall. The
suspicion that he was going to proceed irregularly coincided with a
shortage of grain in the large cities, especially Petrograd (as the
capital was now named), which was gradually stirring the anger of the
people. We may assume that the revolutionary organisation exploited this
anger with all their power, and especially undermined the loyalty of the
few regiments which were left at Petrograd.

On March 8th the people of Petrograd, especially the women, began to
throng the streets, and the workers to quit the factories. Rodzianko,
the President of the Duma, summoned a conference on the food-question,
and he and Professor Milyukoff, the second hero of the revolution,
strongly criticised the incompetence of the ministers. Rodzianko, a
former officer of the Guards and husband of a Golitzin princess, was a
noble of distinction, but he was an Octobrist and a friend of the
people. The crowds were still larger in the streets on March 9th; and on
Sunday, the 11th, they turned out in immense numbers and fraternised
with the few troops who were visible. The guards, however, were
imperfectly won, and on the Sunday afternoon they fired a volley into
the crowd and about a hundred were killed or wounded. It is one of the
strangest testimonies to the amazing condition of Russia that the crowds
remained on the streets and said, sympathetically, to the soldiers: “We
are sorry for you, brothers, you had to do your duty.”

On the Monday morning it became known that the Tsar had suspended for
two months the sittings of the Duma and the Imperial Council, and the
revolution was inaugurated. Troops to the number of about 30,000 marched
upon the arsenal, distributed arms to the people, and fought the police
and the loyal troops. The Progressives and the Socialists formed a
committee of twelve of their ablest representatives, including
Rodzianko, Milyukoff, and Kerenski; and Rodzianko telegraphed to the
Tsar a peremptory demand for a new government. The fight with the
police, who mounted the roofs with rifles and machine-guns, was
continued on the following day, but the public buildings fell one by one
into the hands of the revolutionaries, and about midnight of the 13-14th
the enterprise was crowned by the submission to the Provisional
Government of the Preobrajensky Guards. Moscow soon sent its adhesion,
and the troops in the field gradually assured the new government of
their allegiance.

Nicholas II was with the army, at the headquarters of General Russky,
when the alarming news from Petrograd reached him. He would return to
the capital, he said; but at Bolgoe station he was quietly persuaded to
return to Pskoff. There, in a small, dimly lighted room, the last of the
Romanoffs received the delegates of the people--M. Gutchkoff and a
conservative member of the Duma. It is said that Nicholas asked calmly
what was required of him, and, when he was told that he must abdicate,
he at once demanded a piece of paper. He would not, however, resign the
crown to his son, as they wished. He would not be parted from his son,
he said: and it is probable that he was moved by his deep affection for
the boy. He would leave the throne to his brother Michael. The fateful
document was there and then composed, and Nicholas II signed away his
power: signed, as it proved, the death-warrant of the Romanoff dynasty.
He remains ambiguous in his last imperial pronouncement. In words of
singular dignity and detachment he answers the call of the Russian
people to lay down his autocracy, and he prays for a speedy victory over
Germany. But for the ghastly, unforgettable horrors which stain his
reign we could find words of admiration for the last weak descendant of
Michael Romanoff.

[The End]





End of Project Gutenberg's The Romance of the Romanoffs, by Joseph McCabe