II.
Until Peter the Great, the Romanov Family was a national dynasty. It had remained national from sheer necessity, as no European Court would have cared to intermarry with Tatar and Barbarian Princes. Even at the end of Peter the Great’s reign the prestige of Russia had scarcely asserted itself in the politics of the West. Peter the Great expressed a keen desire to pay a visit to the Court of Louis XIV. He was politely given to understand that his visit would not be acceptable, even as a poor relation will be told that his visit is not welcome to a kinsman in exalted position. After the death of Louis, the Tsar again asked to be received at Versailles. This time his overtures were accepted, but even at the Court of the Regent his visit caused the greatest embarrassment to the masters of ceremonies. The situation was a tragi-comic one. French etiquette could not decide whether the Tatar Prince was to receive the honours which belong of right only to the ruler of a civilized people.
For the first time in modern Russian history, Peter the Great’s daughter, Anne, married a German Prince in 1725. With that year begins that close dynastic alliance with the German Courts which has lasted until our own day. Germany has been carrying on a most thriving export trade of Princes and Princesses with almost every European monarchy—an export trade of which she is reaping the enormous political advantages in the present crisis. But in Russia alone she has obtained a monopoly of this royal export trade. All the Russian Tsars have married German Princesses. For one hundred and fifty years the rule suffered no exception until Alexander II. married a daughter of the Danish Dynasty, which itself is in reality the German Dynasty of Oldenburg.
I need not emphasize the supreme importance of those close family relations between the Courts of Russia and Germany, and especially between the Courts of Russia and Prussia. It is the peculiarity of an autocratic government that the smallest causes are productive of the greatest consequences, and amongst those smaller causes none are likely to produce more far-reaching results than the personal likes and dislikes of the ruler and his family. In the Empire of the Tsars the sympathies of the ruler and of the Imperial family for a hundred and fifty years have generally been German. Women have no less influence in Russia than in other countries, and as every Russian Princess has, for a hundred and fifty years, been German in origin, German by training, German by pride of birth, German by prejudice, the Teutonic influences have necessarily been supreme in the Russian Court. Nor must we forget that every German Princess coming to Petrograd would bring with her a numerous suite of ladies-in-waiting and Court officials, so that the German Court colony was automatically increasing. Indeed, it is no mere chance that the capital, the military harbour, and the chief Imperial residences should all have German names—Kronstadt, Oranienbaum, Schluessenburg, Petersburg, and Peterhof. Peterhof has been the Russian Potsdam. Petersburg has been the outpost of Germany in the Russian Empire, the feste Burg of Prussia until the eve of the war.