That he was surrounded by flatterers goes without saying, but he could nevertheless have manifested some desire to learn the truth, and not have been so continually busy with the exclusive wish to maintain his own authority, which in spite of his efforts to the contrary, no one in the whole of Russia either respected or feared. All the concessions which politically were squeezed out of him, came too late, or else were accepted by him at the wrong time. Even when he seemed in the eyes of the public to be following the advice which was given to him by disinterested and honest persons, he tried in an underhand way to counteract the efficacy of the measures he had himself ordered to be taken, and whenever he resigned himself to the inevitable, he did not understand the reason why he was so doing.
With it all he was in some respects an intelligent man. He cared for good reading, for arts, for music, for all the things which help to make out of life a pleasant thing for irresponsible individuals. He was fond of study, very painstaking, but ignorant, and doing all that was required of him, in an almost automatic manner; kind, it is true, but incapable of coming to any serious resolution or determination of his own accord; devoid of political sense, occasionally most obstinate, and, unfortunately for him as well as for his country and dynasty, he had the misfortune in all the circumstances when a sacrifice of some fraction of his Imperial prerogatives came into question, not to be able to understand either his people or the times he was living in, and to have no thought for anything else but the safety of his own family, forgetting utterly that his country and its welfare ought to have come before them.
When he resigned himself to grant that shadow of a constitution, the advent of which was hailed with such enthusiasm by the whole of Russia, he might still, had he liked, have regained some part at least, of his lost popularity. His personal prestige, or rather that of the position he stood in, was still so great among the nation, that it would have felt gratitude toward him, for every favour he would have chosen to confer upon it, if only he had not taken back all that he had given, almost immediately after he had awarded it. It is quite certain that the first Duma committed many errors, but it should have been remembered that no human achievement can reach perfection at once; and the excitement and effervescence that had followed upon the opening of the first Russian Parliament ought to have been allowed to cool down, and been given sufficient time to make an honest trial of its rights and privileges. At the period I am referring to, and this notwithstanding all that was said to the contrary, a revolution like the one which took place the other day, would have been an impossible thing, because the Sovereign could still rely upon the army, and it would have been better for him had he always leant upon it rather than upon the low crowd of state functionaries with which he was exclusively surrounded and out of which his wife had picked her favourites. He might have checked the then rising tide of radicalism with which he found himself unable to cope later on, and in the strength of which he was to remain to the end mistaken, because he dreaded it when it was not dangerous, and imagined that he had subdued it, at the very moment when it had become, thanks to his own errors, and to his own faults, sufficiently strong to carry him away on its waves.
Such a thorough weakness of character was bound to bring about the most serious consequences, and these did not fail to produce themselves. If Nicholas II. had had beside him a wife able to lead him, to advise him, to open his eyes which perhaps he did not quite close, but which he was never to succeed in keeping sufficiently open, and to show him not only the perils which surrounded him (these she never forgot to point out to him in an exaggerated manner), but also to bring to his notice his duties towards his subjects, he might have become a Sovereign like any other, neither better nor worse, insignificant perhaps, but never really dangerous for his country or for his dynasty. Even if that wife he was so devoted to had wished not to identify herself with State affairs, had kept outside them, and not surrounded herself with people lost to every sense of shame, he might have come out of the numerous difficulties with which he found himself confronted, if not exactly to his honour and credit, at least without losing too much of his prestige. But Alexandra Feodorovna was the fatal and dissolving element which destroyed, thanks to her attitude and conduct, every scrap of respect for the Sovereign, and who inspired in the whole of the nation the desire to get rid of an authority in which it believed no longer, and in which it saw only an obstacle in the way of its development and of its historical evolution. The Empress understood even less than her husband the state of mind of his subjects; she raised between him and them a barrier which nothing could destroy, because it was made out of the contempt which they both inspired in the whole of Russia.
There is one curious thing contrasting with the facility with which Nicholas II. accepted the opinions of others, and with his total absence of personal initiative; and that is the persistence with which he maintained himself during the whole time that his reign lasted, in one line of conduct which never varied in regard to the determination to govern his country in a despotic sense, and which was the more singular that he never knew the meaning of real authority. He always kept listening to those who represented to him that the first duty of a Russian Emperor consisted in keeping up the prestige of the police before the mass of the citizens. Under no reign in Russia, if we except the dark period of the Opritschnikys under Ivan the Terrible, did the police play such an important part in public life, or become guilty of more abuses and of more malversations of every kind. I will not mention here the horrors which took place during and after the revolution of 1905, when no one felt secure against an anonymous denunciation, the consequences of which might be that one saw oneself exiled in Siberia, simply because one had not sufficiently bribed the police officer in charge of the district where one lived; but later on, even after things had calmed down, the might of what was called the Okhrana, remained just as formidable as it had been before. Literally no one could feel safe under this so-called liberal Czar, whilst under the reign of his father everybody possessed of a good and clear conscience could rest peacefully in the certitude that neither the security of his domicile or his personal safety would ever be threatened or infringed upon by the caprice of this secret power called by the vague name of “administration.”
But after all was he really liberal, this Czar who had so little known or understood how to endear himself to his subjects, or did he merely say that such was the case, in order to dissimulate despotic leanings which were the more dangerous that they exercised themselves without any judgment or without any justification for their explosion? A considerable number of persons have wondered about it, and have found themselves unable to solve this riddle. To hear him speak, one would have thought that such was the case, whilst it was hardly possible to talk with him for any length of time, without finding him a sympathetic, kind personality, curious mixture of totally different elements in a character that was chiefly remarkable for its weakness. One could like him, one could even admire some of the qualities which he undoubtedly possessed, but it was utterly impossible to respect in him the Monarch, or to esteem the man, so strange did his conduct sometimes appear, a conduct which finally dragged him into an abyss, together with his family and with his dynasty. Physically, he had a sad and kind face, affectionate and clear blue eyes, a charming voice, much affability in his manners; a wonderfully bright smile, reminding one of his mother’s, a most cordial manner of shaking hands that went straight to the heart and made one suspect a lot of things which in reality did not exist; a rapid and quick walk, a certain hesitation in his speech, and in the expression of his face at times; such was the man. Morally, he was possessed of honesty of purpose to such an extent that he could realise its absence in others; he had no will of any kind, but a good deal of obstinacy; principles which were always forgotten when they interposed themselves between his personal welfare and his duty; no sense of responsibility, but a very exalted opinion of his own rights, and especially of his might; the conviction that autocracy ought to be maintained at any cost, and simultaneously the sincere desire, during a short while, to govern according to the change of system to which he had been compelled to submit, more by the force of things and of events, than through his personal opinions; absolutely no consciousness of the great events with which he found himself mixed up, or of the wants of the country over which he ruled; no conception of the aims he ought to have had in view; no real sympathy for his people, but a vague wish to help them; an unacknowledged dread of finding himself thrown into any intimate contact with the mob, combined with the hope that this feeling would not be noticed by the public at large; far too much confidence in incapable advisers; an exaggerated mistrust of the persons courageous enough to tell him the truth, an absolute incapacity to resist bad influences; sometimes considerable dignity, and often useless haughtiness; a good deal of superstition combined with religion; a deep conviction that his own person was something so sacred that though it might come to be attacked and criticised, yet nobody would be daring enough to lay a sacrilegious hand upon it; a complete incapability of making any distinction between his friends and his foes, and such a persuasive manner that no one could ever contradict or resist him, so that the Revolution in which he lost his Crown must have surprised him to the extent of paralysing all his faculties of realising its importance and its extent; such was the Sovereign.
CHAPTER II
By the side of this Monarch in whom his subjects at last lost every vestige of confidence, there stood a sinister figure, the bad genius of a reign that would most probably have been far more peaceful if it had not been there: the figure of his wife, the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, “the German,” as she had been called even long before the present war broke out. It was undoubtedly to her that were due, at least to a considerable extent, the various misfortunes which have assailed the unfortunate Nicholas II., and it was also she, who, in the brief space of a few short years, discredited him together with the throne to which he had raised her. It was she who destroyed all the prestige which the Monarchy had retained in Russia, until the day when she tarnished it. She was another Marie Antoinette, without any of the qualities, or the courage that had distinguished the latter, who had become the object of the hatred and furious dislike of her subjects, more on account of the vices which were attributed to her, than of those which she really possessed. In regard to the Consort of the Czar Nicholas II., it was just the contrary that occurred, because the general public never became aware of all the strange details concerning the private life of this Princess, who compromised by her conduct the inheritance of her son, together with the Crown which she herself wore. On her arrival in Russia she had been met with expressions of great sympathy, and it would have been relatively easy for her to make herself liked everywhere and by everybody, because the peculiar circumstances which had accompanied her marriage had won for her a sincere popularity all over Russia. At the time she arrived there as the bride of the future Sovereign there existed in the country a strong current of anglomania, which disappeared later on, to revive again during the last year or two. The Princess who came to Livadia from Darmstadt was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, by whom she had been partly brought up, a fact which spoke in her favour because it was supposed that her education would have developed in her liberal opinions, love for freedom, and the desire to make herself liked as well as respected by her future subjects, who received her with the more enthusiasm that they all hoped she would influence in the right direction her husband, whose weakness of character was already at that time known by those who had had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with him. One felt therefore inclined to forgive her any small mistake she might be led into committing during those first days which followed upon her arrival in her new Fatherland. One pitied this young bride, whose marriage was to follow so soon the funeral of the monarch whose untimely death was lamented so deeply by the whole of Russia, and one felt quite disposed, at least among the upper classes of St. Petersburg society, as well as in court circles, to show oneself indulgent in regard to the almost inevitable errors into which she might fall, at the beginning of her career as an Empress. This feeling was so strong that during the first months which followed upon her marriage, the popularity of her mother-in-law, who had been so sincerely loved before, suffered as a consequence of this general wish to make an idol of Alexandra Feodorovna. The eyes of everybody were turned towards the new star that had arisen on the horizon of the Russian capital.
Amidst this general concert of praise which arose on all sides in honour of the newly wedded Empress, there were a few persons who, having had the opportunity to listen to some discordant notes, kept aloof and waited for what the future would bring. At the time of the death of Alexander III., a man belonging to the prominent circles of Russian society, who had been for a long period of years upon terms of personal friendship with the German Royal Family, happened to be in Berlin, and during a visit which he paid to the Empress Frederick, the aunt of the future wife of the new Czar, he told her how many hopes were set in Russia upon her young niece. He was very much surprised to hear the Empress express herself with a certain scepticism in regard to the bride, and finally say that she felt afraid the Princess Alix, as she was still called at the time, would not understand how to make herself beloved by her subjects, or how to win their hearts. Seeing the astonishment provoked by her remark, she added that the character of the girl about to wear the crown of the Romanoffs, was an exceptionally haughty and proud one, and that as in addition to this defect she was possessed of an unusual amount of vanity, she would most probably have her head turned by the grandeur of her position, and would put forward, in place of the intelligence which she did not possess, an exaggerated feeling of her own importance. The gentleman to whom I have referred returned therefore to Russia with fewer illusions concerning Alexandra Feodorovna than the generality of his compatriots indulged in.