The working classes, who had suffered so much from the war—which had arrested the whole industrial system by depriving it of so many hands, and had, furthermore, caused such misery and poverty among the families of those who had been called upon to fight—were getting very bitter against those in authority. Every day brought the Emperor face to face with new and more complicated difficulties, and yet he would not make up his mind to do anything, or to accept any of the propositions that were laid before him. The natural hesitation and want of resolution which were the characteristics of his temperament prevented him from coming to a decision. On the one hand, he could not resign himself to share with a responsible Ministry the least portion of his authority; nor, on the other, make up his mind to appeal to the country to help him to rule it according to the requirements of modern times. The situation grew daily more pressing. It was impossible to keep the army away much longer in Manchuria, now that peace had been concluded, and to bring it back dissatisfied, among a dissatisfied populace, might be the signal for a general rising that it might be found impossible to subdue, especially if any number of the troops joined it.
One cannot help pitying Nicholas II. at this particular period of his existence. He had neither enough insight to judge for himself the perils of the situation in which circumstances had thrown him, nor sufficient energy to make up his mind to one or other course of action. Good intentions he certainly possessed. He had seen his father keep aloft the flag of autocracy, and he wondered why he had not been able to do the same, attributing his failure to the fault of his advisers, and never suspecting that it was due to his own mistakes.
He must have suffered unspeakably during the weeks that preceded the famous 17th of October which saw the promulgation of the manifesto granting to Russia the shadow of a Constitution. I use the word “shadow,” because it was never for a moment intended by the Emperor really to fulfil that which he promised. He still retained a faint hope that he would be able to elude the accomplishment of the reforms which had been wrung from him by the force of circumstances. He thought that the various local rebellions which had already broken out in various parts of the Empire would cease as soon as the news of the concessions which he had been obliged to promise had been duly published.
Unfortunately, events did not take the direction he had expected. Whilst waiting for the election of that Duma which was to represent the constitutional element in the government of the country, Russia was passing through one of the most terrible crises in its history. Never before had the lower orders raised their heads with such audacity and such energy. Never before had a reign of terror, such as then shook the vast dominions of the Romanoffs, carried such fear among all those who belonged to the higher ranks of society. The rising was general, and Europe does not know to this day the scenes of butchery which took place in the provinces, where the peasants not only destroyed the houses and the property belonging to the landlords, but also murdered those among them who had the misfortune to fall into their hands.
Moscow, which had always been considered as the bulwark of conservatism, was the first town to embrace the cause of revolution and to take arms against the Government. What happened there passes the limits of imagination. Troops were sent from St. Petersburg, among others the Semenoffsky regiment of the Guards, to subdue the rebellion. When these troops arrived they found barricades erected everywhere in the town, and they had practically to storm every house separately. Deeds of horror took place, and neither women nor children were spared on either side during the several days that the struggle lasted. Blood flowed freely once more, and those who remembered the catastrophe of Khodinka said that the events that occurred in Moscow were a consequence of what had happened on that distant June day, when the Coronation of Nicholas II. had been celebrated by such a terrible hecatomb of his most faithful subjects.
But though the Moscow rebellion had been crushed; though repression, and cruel repression, had, outwardly, at least, put an end to the Revolution which had in that eventful year 1905 shaken the whole of Russia and left everywhere its bloody traces, the spirit of agitation that lurked in every corner of the country had not been subdued, and Count Witte—who was well aware of this fact—kept pressing the Emperor to fix a date for calling together the Duma, and for the election of its members. Nicholas II. hesitated for a long time; but at last, bending before the necessities of the hour, he yielded, and on one fine May morning he opened, with much pomp and solemnity in the White Hall of the Winter Palace, the first Parliament of its kind in Russia.
THE WINTER PALACE, ST. PETERSBURG
As seen through the Nevski Prospekt Archway