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.