For these reasons, in accord with the Duma of the Empire, We think it Our duty to abdicate the Crown and lay down the supreme power.
Not desiring to be separated from Our beloved son, We bequeath Our heritage to Our brother, the Grand-Duke Michael Alexandrovitch, and give him Our blessing. We abjure him to govern in perfect accord with the representatives of the nation sitting in the legislative institutions, and to take a sacred oath in the name of the beloved Fatherland.
We appeal to all the loyal sons of the country, imploring them to fulfil their patriotic and holy duty of obeying their Czar in this sad time of national trial. We ask them to help him and the representatives of the nation to guide the Russian state into the path of prosperity and glory.
God help Russia.
The Czar had fallen. Germany was on the point of winning her greatest victory, but the fruits might still escape her. They would have escaped her if the intelligent section of the nation had recovered itself in time and had gathered round the Grand-Duke Michael, who, by his brother’s desire—the Act of Abdication said so in terms—was to be a constitutional sovereign in the full sense of the word. Nothing prevented so desirable a consummation, for Russia was not yet in the presence of one of those great popular movements which defy all logic and hurl nations into the gulf of the unknown. The revolution had been exclusively the work of the Petrograd population, the majority of which would not have hesitated to rally round the new ruler if the Provisional Government and the Duma had set the example. The army, which was still a well-disciplined body, represented a serious force. As for the great bulk of the nation, it had not the slightest idea that anything had passed.
This last chance of averting the catastrophe was lost through thirst for power and fear of the Extremists. The day after the Czar’s abdication the Grand-Duke Michael, acting on the advice of all save two of the members of the Provisional Government, renounced the throne in turn and resigned to a constituent assembly the task of deciding what the future form of government should be.
The irreparable step had been taken. The removal of the Czar had left in the minds of the masses a gaping void it was impossible for them to fill. They were left to their own devices—a rudderless ship at the mercy of the waves—and searching for an ideal, some article of faith which might replace what they had lost, they found nothing but chaos around them.
To finish her work of destruction, Germany had only to give Lenin and his disciples a plentiful supply of money and let them loose on Russia. Lenin and his friends never dreamed of talking to the peasants about a democratic republic or a constituent assembly. They knew it would have been waste of breath. As up-to-date prophets, they came to preach the holy war and to try and draw these untutored millions by the attraction of a creed in which the finest teaching of Christ goes hand in hand with the worst sophisms—a creed which, thanks to the Jews, the adventurers of Bolshevism, was to be translated into the subjection of the moujik and the ruin of the country.