Behind the veil at the Russian court

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

A few days later, however, the mistake was rectified, and M. Lapoukhine was allowed to leave Siberia; but the first impression could not be corrected. It was felt that this act of mercy, coming as it did after the time it was hoped for, was robbing it of its whole grandeur and generosity. On the Jubilee Day it would have raised a universal acclamation; a week later, it fell flat, because it appeared to have been merely compelled by the general indignation evoked by its neglect on an occasion when peace and pardon ought to have been in the forefront with a strength that no circumstance and no advice from any individual should have been able to restrain.

The only point in which the amnesty satisfied the public was its application to all matters relating to the press and its misdeeds. There, for the first time in the history of modern Russia, the pardons granted were complete and without restrictions, and the satisfaction which they provoked was absolutely sincere and heart-whole.

It is one of the misfortunes of Nicholas II. that he is so badly advised by those who surround him.

The festivities themselves provoked no enthusiasm from the crowds. They were damped externally by the rain, which fell in torrents during the whole time they lasted, and morally by the disappointment provoked by the manifesto. The streets were sumptuously decorated, the illuminations in the town were splendid, the ball offered by the nobility of the province of St. Petersburg to the Sovereigns was like fairyland in its magnificence, but the nation remained indifferent. Its feelings were not in unison with the spirit of the celebrations; it did not share with the Imperial House the joy that House seemed to feel upon so auspicious an occasion.

The jubilee celebrations had, however, one distinguishing feature. The Emperor and his family came from Tsarskoye Selo, and for the first time since the war and the revolution resided for three days in the Winter Palace. On March 6th they drove in state to the Kazan Cathedral for a solemn service of thanksgiving. All the wealth and rank of St. Petersburg were assembled there to greet them. All the high functionaries of the Empire were present. Troops were assembled and lined the streets through which the Imperial procession passed. Their cheers alone, however, broke the stillness of those streets, for the populace was absent. Except a few chosen persons, police, and soldiers, none was present from the nation, which thus tacitly declined to participate in the festival. The Emperor himself looked grave and pale. He drove in an open carriage, with his little son seated beside him, and when he entered the cathedral a Cossack from the escort took the child in his arms and carried him inside the church, where he was placed in a chair beside his mother. The sight was inexpressibly sad, because it proved the truth of what had been whispered ever since the autumn, that the Heir to the Throne was still suffering from disease. The white, pinched, small face of the boy, gazing anxiously round him at all the sea of human beings before him, engrossed with the beauty of the unaccustomed pageant, painfully impressed the spectators in the cathedral, and many a mother among the ladies present sighed as she looked at him, murmuring to herself, “Poor little fellow, what a pity, and how sad for the parents!”

The members of the Imperial Family who had preceded the Sovereign to the cathedral bowed profoundly as he appeared through the huge doorway. The Patriarch of Antiochus, who had specially travelled to Russia for this important occasion, advanced, surrounded by priests, monks, bishops, and members of the higher clergy, whose flowing hair, long beards, golden robes, and heavily bejewelled mitres added to the picturesqueness of the spectacle. Everywhere one turned the eye rested on embroidered uniforms, glittering cuirasses, ladies attired in white, lighted tapers, and ikons shining forth in the semi-darkness of the vast cathedral, with the glory of the diamonds and precious stones which adorned them. The choristers intoned the anthem for the day in soft harmonies, which gradually grew louder and louder; whilst Nicholas II. and his Consort, bending down before the Patriarch, received from his hands the Holy Water which he presented to them, and kissed the Cross with which he blessed them.

Then they took up their places under the crimson canopy, which had been erected in their honour opposite the altar, and facing the miraculous image of Our Lady of Kazan, patroness of the church and of Russia. They stood there together, the Emperor erect, and with a glance that kept anxiously and furtively scanning the faces of the assembly as if afraid of meeting some secret danger lurking somewhere behind the pillars of the edifice; the Empress robed in white, with the blue ribbon of St. Andrew across her shoulder, sadness upon her classically beautiful features, was immobile as a statue, save when she bent down now and then over the arm-chair in which her little son had been placed. Standing a little before her, on the right side of Nicholas II., was his mother, the sweet Empress Marie, also dressed in white, with tears filling her beautiful soft eyes, the only pathetic figure in the vast assemblage save the child on whom so many hopes were centred, and who, by an irony which perhaps was realised by few among the spectators, appeared to have been brought there for the purpose of showing into what weak and frail hands was entrusted the future of that proud Romanoff Dynasty.

The head of it remained in his place throughout the Divine Service of thanksgiving, which was celebrated by all the bishops. He, too, bent his knee with his subjects during the blessing with which it ended, and then slowly he left the cathedral. As he appeared on its threshold a fleeting ray of sun rested on his head. It reminded me of that other glorious light that on an occasion perhaps even more solemn had hovered above the brow of his father Alexander III. as he emerged from the golden gates of the Church of the Assumption in Moscow, with the huge diamond crown of his ancestors which he had just assumed resting upon it. Nearly thirty years had gone by since that day; the mighty Tsar was lying in his quiet grave, and nearly all those who had accompanied him on that memorable day had also disappeared from this earthly scene. Nearly everything had been changed, but the places and people who knew him no more were weeping for him, even amidst the pomp of the present festival.

As I examined the pale, impassive features of his successor, I wondered whether he gave a thought to another bleak March morning, when, still a boy, he had waited, together with his brothers and sisters, for the return of his parents from the Winter Palace, where they had been summoned to see a monarch die whose Crown they were to inherit. Did he remember, I wondered, the first words uttered by the new Sovereign when receiving the bread and the salt with which his servants greeted him on his entering for the first time his Anitchkov Palace as the Tsar of All the Russias, “I will try to be a father to my people.” As the memory of those words rang in the ears of the few among that vast company who had heard them, what a melancholy contrast they afforded to the actual “mercies” with which Nicholas II. had seen fit to celebrate the three hundredth year of the accession of his Dynasty to the Throne of the Ruriks.

As I watched the brilliant procession pass before me, I thought, too, of that other far-away May morning which had witnessed the Coronation of Alexander III.; of the peace and prosperity which his short reign had brought to the vast Empire over the destinies of which he had so wisely presided. Whither had fled that peace he had tried so hard to establish permanently within his realms? The eighteen years that had elapsed since his death had only brought disaster, strife, uneasiness to the nation he had loved so well.