Part 2 (1/2)

The Russian proletariat found its revolutionary audacity not only in itself. Its very posi-tion as minority of the nation suggests that it could not have given its struggle a suf.cient scope certainly not enough to take its place at the head of the state -if it had not found a mighty support in the thick of the people. Such a support was guaranteed to it by the agrarian problem.

The belated half-liberation of the peasants in 1861 had found agricultural industry al-most on the same level as two hundred years before. The preservation of the old area of communal land -somewhat .lched from during the reform together with the archaic methods of land culture, automatically sharpened a crisis caused by the rural excess popu-lation, which was at the same time a crisis in the three-fold system. The peasantry felt still more caught in a trap because the process was not taking place in the seventeenth but in the nineteenth century that is, in the conditions of an advanced money economy which made demands upon the wooden plough that could only be met by a tractor. Here too we see a drawing together of separate stages of the historic process, and as a result an extreme sharpening of contradictions. The learned agronomes and economists had been preaching that the old area with rational cultivation would be amply suf.cient that is to say, they proposed to the peasant to make a jump to a higher level of technique and culture without disturbing the landlord, the bailiff, or the tzar. But no economic r'egime, least of all an agricultural r'

egime, the most tardy of all, has ever disappeared before exhausting all its possibilities. Before feeling compelled to pa.s.s over to a more intensive economic culture, the peasant had to make a last attempt to broaden his three .elds. This could obviously be achieved only at the expense of non-peasant lands. Choking in the narrowness of his land area, under the smarting whip of the treasury and the market, the muzhik was inexorably forced to attempt to get rid of the landlord once for all.

On the eve of the .rst revolution the whole stretch of arable land within the limits of European Russia was estimated at 280 million dessiatins.[2] The communal allotments const.i.tuted about 140 million. The crown lands, above 5 million. Church and monastery lands, about 2.5 million. Of the privately owned land, 70 million dessiatins belonged to the 30,000 great landlords, each of whom owned above 500 dessiatins. This 70 million was about what would have belonged to 10 million peasant families. The land statistics const.i.tute the .nished programme of a peasant war.

The landlords were not settled with in the .rst revolution. Not all the peasants rose. The movement in the country did not coincide with that in the cities. The peasant army wavered, and .nally supplied suf.cient forces for putting down the workers. As soon as the s.e.m.e.novsky Guard regiment had settled with the Moscow insurrection, the monarchy abandoned all thought of cutting down the landed estates, as also its own autocratic rights.

However, the defeated revolution did not pa.s.s without leaving traces in the village. the government abolished the old land redemption payments and opened the way to a broader colonisation of Siberia. The frightened landlords not only made considerable concessions in the matter of rentals, but also began a large-scale selling of their landed estates. These fruits of the revolution were enjoyed by the better-off peasants, who were able to rent and buy the landlords' land.

However, the broadest gates were opened for the emerging of capitalist farmers from the peasant cla.s.s by the law of November 9, 1906, the chief reform introduced by the vic-torious counter-revolution. Giving the right even to a small minority of the peasants of the commune, against the will of the majority, to cut out from the communal land a section to be owned independently, the law of November 9 const.i.tuted an explosive capitalist sh.e.l.l directed against the commune. The president of the Council of Ministers, Stolypin, de-scribed the essence of this governmental policy towards the peasants as ”banking on the strong ones.” This meant: encourage the upper circles of the peasantry to get hold of the communal land by buying up these ”liberated” sections, and convert these new capitalist farmers into a support for the existing r'

egime. It was easier to propose such a task, however, than to achieve it. In this attempt to subst.i.tute the kulak problem for the peasant problem, the counter-revolution was destined to break its neck.

By January 1, 1916, 2.5 million home-owners had made good their personal possession of 17 million dessiatins. Two more million home-owners were demanding the allotment to them of 14 million dessiatins. This looked like a colossal success for the reform. But the majority of the homesteads were completely incapable of sustaining life, and represented only material for natural selection. At that time when the more backward landlords and small peasants were selling on a large scale the former their estates, the latter their bits of land there emerged in the capacity of princ.i.p.al purchaser a new peasant bourgeoisie. Agriculture entered upon a state of indubitable capitalist boom. The export of agricultural products from Russia rose between 1908 and 1912 from 1 billion roubles to 1.5 billion. This meant that broad ma.s.ses of the peasantry had been proletarianised, and the upper circles of the villages were throwing on the market more and more grain.

To replace the compulsory communal ties of the peasantry, there developed very swiftly a voluntary co-operation, which succeeded in penetrating quite deeply into the peasant ma.s.ses in the course of a few years, and immediately became a subject of liberal and democratic idealisation. Real power in the co-operatives belonged, however, only to the rich peasants, whose interests in the last a.n.a.lysis they served. The Narodnik intelligentsia, by concentrating its chief forces in peasant co-operation, .nally succeeded in s.h.i.+fting its love for the people on to good solid bourgeois rails. In this way was prepared, partially at least, the political bloc of the ”anti-capitalist” party of the Social Revolutionaries with the Kadets, the capitalist party par excellence.

Liberalism, although preserving the appearance of opposition to the agrarian policy of the reaction, nevertheless looked with great hopes upon this capitalist destruction of the communes. ”In the country a very powerful petty bourgeoisie is arising,” wrote the liberal Prince Troubetskoy, ”in its whole make and essence alien alike to the ideals of the united n.o.bility and to the socialist dreams.”

But this admirable medal had its other side. There was arising from the destroyed communes not only a ”very powerful bourgeoisie,” but also its ant.i.thesis. The number of peasants selling tracts of land they could not live on had risen by the beginning of the war to a million, which means no less than .ve million souls added to the proletarian population. A suf.ciently explosive material was also supplied by the millions of peasant-paupers to whom nothing remained but to hang on to their hungry allotments. In consequence those contradictions kept reproducing themselves among the peasants which had so early under-mined the development of bourgeois society as a whole in Russia. The new rural bour-geoisie which was to create a support for the old and more powerful proprietors, turned out to be as hostilely opposed to the fundamental ma.s.ses of the peasantry as the old propri-etors had been to the people as a whole. Before it could become a support to the existing order, this peasant bourgeoisie had need of some order of its own wherewith to cling to its conquered positions. In these circ.u.mstances it is no wonder that the agrarian problem continued a sharp one in all the State Dumas. Everyone felt that the last word had not yet been spoken. The peasant deputy Petrichenko once declared from the tribune of the Duma: ”No matter how long you debate you won't create a new planet that means that you will have to give us the land.” This peasant was neither a Bolshevik, nor a Social Revolutionary. On the contrary, he was a Right deputy, a monarchist.

The agrarian movement, having, like the strike movement of the workers, died down toward the end of 1907, partially revives in 1908, and grows stronger during the following years. The struggle, to be sure, is transferred to a considerable degree within the commune: that is just what the reaction had .gured on politically. There are not infrequent armed con.icts among peasants during the division of the communal land. But the struggle against the landlord also does not disappear. The peasants are more frequently setting .re to the landlord's manors, harvest, haystacks, seizing on the way also those individual tracts which had been cut off against the will of the communal peasants.

The war found the peasantry in this condition. The government carried away from the country about 10 million workers and about 2 million horses. The weak homesteads grew still weaker. The number of peasants who could not sow their .elds increased. But in the second year of the war the middle peasants also began to go under. Peasant hostility toward the war sharpened from month to month. In October 1916, the Petrograd Gendarme Administration reported that in the villages they had already ceased to believe in the success of the war the report being based on the words of insurance agents, teachers, traders, etc. ”All are waiting and impatiently demanding: When will this cursed war .nally end?” And this is not all: ”Political questions are being talked about everywhere and resolutions adopted directed against the landlords and merchants. Nuclei of various organisations are being formed....As yet there is no uniting centre, but there is no reason to suppose that the peasants will unite by way of the co-operatives which are daily growing throughout all Russia.” There is some exaggeration here. In some things the gendarme has run ahead a little, but the fundamentals are indubitably correct.

The possessing cla.s.ses could not foresee that the village was going to present its bill. But they drove away these black thoughts, hoping to wriggle out of it somehow. On this theme the inquisitive French amba.s.sador Pal'

eologue had a chat during the war days with the former Minister of Agriculture Krivoshein, the former Premier Kokovtsev, the great landlord Count Bobrinsky, the President of the State Duma Rodzianko, the great indus-trialist Putilov, and other distinguished people. Here is what was unveiled before him in this conversation: In order to carry into action a radical land reform it would require the work of a standing army of 300,000 surveyors for no less than .fteen years; but during this time the number of homesteads would increase to 30 million, and consequently all these preliminary calculations by the time they were made would prove invalid. To introduce a land reform thus seemed in the eyes of these landlords, of.cials and bankers something like squaring the circle. It is hardly necessary to say that a like mathematical scrupulousness was completely alien to the peasants. He thought that .rst of all the thing to do was to smoke out the landlord, and then see.

If the village nevertheless remained comparatively peaceful during the war, that was because its active forces were at the front. The soldiers did not forget about the land whenever at least they were not thinking about death and in the trenches the muzhik's thoughts about the future were saturated with the smell of powder. But all the same the peasantry, even after learning to handle .rearms, could never of its own force have achieved the agrarian democratic revolution that is, its own revolution. It had to have leaders.h.i.+p. For the .rst time in world history the peasant was destined to .nd a leader in the person of the worker. In that lies the fundamental, and you may say the whole difference between the Russian revolution and all those preceding it.

In England serfdom had disappeared in actual fact by the end of the fourteenth century that is, two centuries before it arose in Russia, and four and a half centuries before it was abolished. The expropriation of the landed property of the peasants dragged along in England through one Reformation and two revolutions to the nineteenth century. The capitalist development, not forced from the outside, thus had suf.cient time to liquidate the independent peasant long before the proletariat awoke to political life.

In France the struggle with royal absolutism, the aristocracy, and the princes of the church, compelled the bourgeoisie in various of its layers, and in several instalments, to achieve a radical agrarian revolution at the beginning of the eighteenth century. For long after that an independent peasantry const.i.tuted the support of the bourgeois order, and in 1871 it helped the bourgeoisie put down the Paris Commune.

In Germany the bourgeoisie proved incapable of a revolutionary solution of the agrarian problem, and in 1848 betrayed the peasants to the landlords, just as Luther some three centuries before in the peasant wars had betrayed them to the princes. On the other hand, the German proletariat was still too weak in the middle of the nineteenth century to take the leaders.h.i.+p of the peasantry. As a result the capitalist development of Germany got suf.cient time, although not so long a period as in England, to subordinate agriculture, as it emerged from the uncompleted bourgeois revolution, to its own interests.

The peasant reform of 1861 was carried out in Russia by an aristocratic and bureaucratic monarchy under pressure of the demands of a bourgeois society, but with the bourgeoisie completely powerless politically. The character of this peasant emanc.i.p.ation was such that the forced capitalistic transformation of the country inevitably converted the agrarian prob-lem into a problem of revolution. The Russian bourgeois dreamed of an agrarian evolution on the French plan, or the Danish, or the American anything you want, only not the Rus-sian. He neglected, however, to supply himself in good season with a French history or an American social structure. The democratic intelligentsia, notwithstanding its revolutionary past, took its stand in the decisive hour with the liberal bourgeoisie and the landlord, and not with the revolutionary village. In these circ.u.mstances only the working cla.s.s could stand at the head of the peasant revolution.

The law of combined development of backward countries in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors here rises before us in its most .nished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian revolution. If the agrarian problem, as a heritage from the barbarism of the old Russian history, had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917. In order to realise the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to com-pletely different historic species: a peasant war that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline. That is the essence of 1917.

1. Narodnik is a general name for those non-Marxians who had originally hoped to accomplish the regeneration of Russia by ”going to the people (narod),” and out of whom developed the Social Revolutionary party. The Mensheviks were the right, or so-called ”moderate,” wing of the Marxian or Social Democratic party, whom Lenin abandoned in 1903. [Trans.]

2. A dessiatin is 2.702 English acres. [Trans.]

CHAPTER 4.

THE TZAR AND THE TZARINA.

This book will concern itself least of all with those unrelated psychological researches which are now so often subst.i.tuted for social and historical a.n.a.lysis. Foremost in our .eld of vision will stand the great, moving forces of history, which are super-personal in character. Monarchy is one of them. But all these forces operate through people. And monarchy is by its very principle bound up with the personal. This in itself justi.es an interest in the personality of that monarch whom the process of social development brought face to face with a revolution. Moreover, we hope to show in what follows, partially at least, just where in a personality the strictly personal ends often much sooner than we think and how frequently the ”distinguis.h.i.+ng traits” of a person are merely individual scratches made by a higher law of development.

Nicholas II inherited from his ancestors not only a giant empire, but also a revolution. And they did not bequeath him one quality which would have made him capable of gov-erning an empire or even a province or a county. To that historic .ood which was rolling its billows each one closer to the gates of his palace, the last Romanov opposed only a dumb indifference. It seemed as though between his consciousness and his epoch there stood some transparent but absolutely impenetrable medium.

People surrounding the tzar often recalled after the revolution that in the most tragic moments of his reigns at the time of the surrender of Port Arthur and the sinking of the .eet at Tsu-s.h.i.+ma, and ten years later at the time of the retreat of the Russian troops from Galicia, and then two years later during the days preceding his abdication when all those around him were depressed, alarmed, shaken Nicholas alone preserved his tranquillity. He would inquire as usual how many versts he had covered in his journeys about Russia, would recall episodes of hunting expeditions in the past, anecdotes of of.cial meetings, would interest himself generally in the little rubbish of the day's doings, while thunders roared over him and lightnings .ashed. ”What is this?” asked one of his attendant generals, ”a gigantic, almost unbelievable self-restraint, the product of breeding, of a belief in the divine predetermination of events? Or is it inadequate consciousness?” The answer is more than half included in the question. The so-called ”breeding” of the tzar, his ability to control himself in the most extraordinary circ.u.mstances, cannot be explained by a mere external training; its essence was an inner indifference, a poverty of spiritual forces, a weakness of the impulses of the will. That mask of indifference which was called breeding in certain circles, was a natural part of Nicholas at birth.

The tzar's diary is the best of all testimony. From day to day and from year to year drags along upon its pages the depressing record of spiritual emptiness. ”Walked long and killed two crows. Drank tea by daylight.” Promenades on foot, rides in a boat. And then again crows, and again tea. All on the borderline of physiology. Recollections of church ceremonies are jotted down in the same tome as a drinking party.

In the days preceding the opening of the State Duma, when the whole country was shaking with convulsions, Nicholas wrote: ”April 14. Took a walk in a thin s.h.i.+rt and took up paddling again. Had tea in a balcony. Stana dined and took a ride with us. Read.” Not a word as to the subject of his reading. Some sentimental English romance? Or a report from the Police Department? ”April 15: Accepted Witte's resignation. Marie and Dmitri to dinner. Drove them home to the palace.”

On the day of the decision to dissolve the Duma, when the court as well as the liberal circles were going through a paroxysm of fright, the tzar wrote in his diary: ”July 7. Friday. Very busy morning. Half hour late to breakfast with the of.cers....A storm came up and it was very muggy. We walked together. Received Goremykin. Signed a decree dissolving the Duma! Dined with Olga and Petia. Read all evening.” An exclamation point after the coming dissolution of the Duma is the highest expression of his emotions. The deputies of the dispersed Duma summoned the people to refuse to pay taxes. A series of military uprisings followed: in Sveaborg, Kronstadt, on s.h.i.+ps, in army units. The revolutionary terror against high of.cials was renewed on an unheard-of scale. The tzar writes: ”July 9. Sunday. It has happened! The Duma was closed today. At breakfast after Ma.s.s long faces were noticeable among many....The weather was .ne. On our walk we met Uncle Misha who came over yesterday from Gatchina. Was quietly busy until dinner and all evening. Went padding in a canoe.” It was in a canoe he went paddling that is told. But with what he was busy all evening is not indicated. So it was always.

And further in those same fatal days: ”July 14. Got dressed and rode a bicycle to the bathing beach and bathed enjoyably in the sea.” ”July 15. Bathed twice. It was very hot. Only us two at dinner. A storm pa.s.sed over.” ”July 19. Bathed in the morning. Received at the farm. Uncle Vladimir and Chagin lunched with us.” An insurrection and explosions of dynamite are barely touched upon with a single phrase, ”Pretty doings!” astonis.h.i.+ng in its imperturbable indifference, which never rose to conscious cynicism.

”At 9:30 in the morning we rode out to the Caspian regiment...walked for a long time. The weather was wonderful. Bathed in the sea. After tea received Lvov and Guchkov.” Not a word of the fact that this unexpected reception of the two liberals was brought about by the attempt of Stolypin to include opposition leaders in his ministry. Prince Lvov, the future head of the Provisional Government, said of that reception at the time: ”I expected to see the sovereign stricken with grief, but instead of that there came out to meet me a jolly sprightly fellow in a raspberry-coloured s.h.i.+rt.” The tzar's outlook was not broader than that of a minor police of.cial with this difference, that the latter would have a better knowledge of reality and be less burdened with superst.i.tions. The sole paper which Nicholas read for years, and from which he derived his ideas, was a weekly published on state revenue by Prince Meshchersky, a vile, bribed journalist of the reactionary bureaucratic clique, despised even in his own circle. The tzar kept his outlook unchanged through two wars and two revolutions. Between his consciousness and events stood always that impenetrable medium indifference. Nicholas was called, not without foundation, a fatalist. It is only necessary to add that his fatalism was the exact opposite of an active belief in his ”star.” Nicholas indeed considered himself unlucky. His fatalism was only a form of pa.s.sive self-defence against historic evolution, and went hand in hand with an arbitrariness, trivial in psychological motivation, but monstrous in its consequences.

”I wish it and therefore it must be ” writes Count Witte. ”That motto appeared in all the activities of this weak ruler, who only through weakness did all the things which characterised his reign a wholesale shedding of more or less innocent blood, for the most part without aim.”

Nicholas is sometimes compared with his half-crazy great-great-grandfather Paul, who was strangled by a camarilla acting in agreement with his own son, Alexander ”the Blessed.” These two Romanovs were actually alike in their distrust of everybody due to a distrust of themselves, their touchiness as of omnipotent n.o.bodies, their feeling of abnegation, their consciousness, as you might say, of being crowned pariahs. But Paul was incomparably more colourful; there was an element of fancy in his rantings, however irresponsible. In his descendant everything was dim; there was not one sharp trait.

Nicholas was not only unstable, but treacherous. Flatterers called him a charmer, be-witcher, because of his gentle way with the courtiers. But the tzar reserved his special caresses for just those of.cials whom he had decided to dismiss. Charmed beyond measure at a reception, the minister would go home and .nd a letter requesting his resignation. That was a kind of revenge on the tzar's part for his own nonent.i.ty.

Nicholas recoiled in hostility before everything gifted and signi.cant. He felt at ease only among completely mediocre and brainless people, saintly fakers, holy men, to whom he did not have to look up. He had his amour propre indeed it was rather keen. But it was not active, not possessed of a grain of initiative, enviously defensive. He selected his min-isters on a principle of continual deterioration. Men of brain and character he summoned only in extreme situations when there was no other way out, just as w call in a surgeon to save our lives. It was so with Witte, and afterwards with Stolypin. The tzar treated both with ill-concealed hostility. As soon as the crisis had pa.s.sed, he hastened to part with these counsellors who were too tall for him. This selection operated so systematically that the president of the last Duma, Rodzianko, on the 7th of January 1917, with the revolution already knocking at the doors, ventured to say to the tzar: ”Your Majesty, there is not one reliable or honest man left around you; all the best men have been removed or have retired. There remain only those of ill repute.”

All the efforts of the liberal bourgeoisie to .nd a common language with the court came to nothing. The tireless and noisy Rodzianko tried to shake up the tzar with his reports, but in vain. The latter gave no answer either to argument or to impudence, but quietly made ready to dissolve the Duma. Grand Duke Dmitri, a former favourite of the tzar, and future accomplice in the murder of Rasputin, complained to his colleague, Prince Yussupov, that the tzar at headquarters was becoming every day more indifferent to everything around him. In Dmitri's opinion the tzar was being fed some kind of dope which had a benumbing action upon his spiritual faculties. ”Rumours went round,” writes the liberal historian Miliukov, ”that this condition of mental and moral apathy was sustained in the tzar by an increased use of alcohol.” This was all fancy or exaggeration. The tzar had no need of narcotics: the fatal ”dope” was in his blood. Its symptoms merely seemed especially striking on the background of those great events of war and domestic crisis which led up to the revolution. Rasputin, who was a psychologist, said brie.y of the tzar that he ”lacked insides.”

This dim, equable and ”well-bred” man was cruel not with the active cruelty of Ivan the Terrible or of Peter, in the pursuit of historic aims What had Nicholas the Second in common with them? but with the cowardly cruelty of the late born, frightened at his own doom. At the very dawn of his reign Nicholas praised the Phanagoritsy regiment as ”.ne fellows” for shooting down workers. He always ”read with satisfaction” how they .ogged with whips the bob-haired girl-students, or cracked the heads of defenceless people during Jewish pogroms. This crowned black sheep gravitated with all his soul to the very dregs of society, the Black Hundred hooligans. He not only paid them generously from the state treasury, but loved to chat with them about their exploits, and would pardon them when they accidentally got mixed up in the murder of an opposition deputy. Witte, who stood at the head of the government during the putting down of the .rst revolution, has written in his memoirs: ”When news of the useless cruel antics of the chiefs of those detachments reached the sovereign, they met with his approval, or in any case his defence.” In answer to the demand of the governor-general of the Baltic States that he stop a certain lieutenant-captain, Richter, who was ”executing on his own authority and without trial non-resistant persons,” the tzar wrote on the report: ”Ah, what a .ne fellow!” Such encouragements are innumerable. This ”charmer,” without will, without aim, without imagination, was more awful than all the tyrants of ancient and modern history.

The tzar was mightily under the in.uence of the tzarina, an in.uence which increased with the years and the dif.culties. Together they const.i.tuted a kind of unit and that combination shows already to what an extent the personal, under pressure of circ.u.mstances, is supplemented by the group. But .rst we must speak of the tzarina herself.

Maurice Palologue, the French amba.s.sador at Petrograd during the war, a re.ned psy-chologist for French academicians and janitresses, offers a meticulously licked portrait of the last tzarina: ”Moral restlessness, a chronic sadness, in.nite longing, intermittent ups and downs of strength, anguis.h.i.+ng thoughts of the invisible other world, superst.i.tions are not all these traits, so clearly apparent in the personality of the empress, the characteristic traits of the Russian people?” Strange as it may seem, there is in this saccharine lie just a grain of truth. The Russian satirist Saltykov, with some justi.cation, called the ministers and governors from among the Baltic barons ”Germans with a Russian soul.” It is indu-bitable that aliens, in no way connected with the people, developed the most pure culture of the ”genuine Russian” administrator.

But why did the people repay with such open hatred a tzarina who, in the words of Palo-logue, had so completely a.s.similated their soul? The answer is simple. In order to justify her new situation, this German woman adopted with a kind of cold fury all the traditions and nuances of Russian mediaevalism, the most meagre and crude of all mediaevalisms, in that very period when the people were making mighty efforts to free themselves from it. This Hessian princess was literally possessed by the demon of autocracy. Having risen from her rural corner to the heights of Byzantine despotism, she would not for anything take a step down. In the orthodox religion she found a mysticism and a magic adapted to her new lot. She believed the more in.exibly in her vocation, the more naked became the foulness of the old rgime. With a strong character and a gift for dry and hard exaltations, the tzarina supplemented the weak-willed tzar, ruling over him.

On March 17, 1916, a year before the revolution, when the tortured country was already writhing in the grip of defeat and ruin, the tzarina wrote to her husband at military head-quarters: ”You must not give indulgences, a responsible ministry, etc....or anything that they want. This must be your war and your peace, and the honour yours and our fatherland's, and not by any means the Duma's. They have not the right to say a single word in these matters.” This was at any rate a thoroughgoing programme. And it was in just this way that she always had the whip hand over the continually vacillating tzar.

After Nicholas' departure to the army in the capacity of .ct.i.tious commander-in-chief, the tzarina began openly to take charge of internal affairs. The ministers came to her with reports as to a regent. She entered into a conspiracy with a small camarilla against the Duma, against the ministers, against the staff-generals, against the whole world to some extent indeed against the tzar. On December 6, 1916, the tzarina wrote to the tzar: ”...Once you have said that you want to keep Protopopov, how does he (Premier Trepov) go against you? Bring down your .rst on the table. Don't yield. Be the boss. Obey your .rm little wife and our Friend. Believe in us.” Again three days late: ”You know you are right. Carry your head high. Command Trepov to work with him....Strike your .st on the table.” Those phrases sound as though they were made up, but they are taken from authentic letters. Besides, you cannot make up things like that.

On December 13 the tzarina suggest to the tzar: ”Anything but this responsible ministry about which everybody has gone crazy. Everything is getting quiet and better, but people want to feel your hand. How long they have been saying to me, for whole years, the same thing: 'Russia loves to feel the whip.' That is their nature!” This orthodox Hessian, with a Windsor upbringing and a Byzantine crown on her head, not only ”incarnates” the Russian soul, but also organically despises it. Their nature demands the whip writes the Russian tzarina to the Russian tzar about the Russian people, just two months and a half before the monarchy tips over into the abyss.