Unfortunately things turned out quite differently. Alexandra Feodorovna declared that she considered it her duty to go on doing exactly what her dead and gone friend had advised her to do, and the partisans of a separate peace with Germany found in her a more solid protection than the one they had enjoyed before. She pursued unmercifully all those who had tried to open the eyes of the Emperor, and the first thing she did, after having seen the Grand Duke Dmitry sent to Persia and Prince Youssoupoff exiled, was to cause the Czar to write to the Grand Duke Nicholas Michaylovitsch, who had addressed to him the letter which had incensed her so terribly, and command him to leave Petrograd and repair for two months to an estate which he owned in the South of Russia, in the government of Kherson. This order was brought to the Grand Duke by an Imperial messenger, on the last day of the year 1916, at half past eleven o’clock at night. It was written entirely in the Emperor’s hand, and was couched in the following terms: “I command you to start at once for Grouchevka, and to remain there two months. Nicholas.” But there was added a postscript that had been probably written without the Empress’s knowledge, under the vague feeling of remorse for such an unjustifiable action, and which said: “I beg you to do what I ask you.” Other Grand Dukes attempted in their turn to shake the influence of Alexandra Feodorovna, and to point out to the Czar the peril which it represented for the dynasty. Many angry scenes took place at Tsarskoie Selo, between them and the master of this Imperial place, but they all led to nothing, and when the wife of the Grand Duke Cyril, the Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna, sought the Sovereign on her own initiative, and tried to make him realise the great unpopularity of his consort, Nicholas II. interrupted her with the exclamation: “What has Alice got to do with politics? She is only a sister of mercy, and nothing else. And in regard to her so-called unpopularity, what you say is not exact.”
He then proceeded to show his cousin any amount of letters emanating from wounded soldiers, who thanked the Empress for the care which she had taken of them, letters of which not a single one was genuine, and which had been manufactured at the instigation of Sturmer and Protopopoff. The truth of the matter was that the wounded and sick in the different hospitals visited by Alexandra Feodorovna, did not at all harbour kind feelings in regard to her, as they reproached her with giving all her care and attention to the German prisoners, to the detriment of her own soldiers. And among other stories which were related concerning those visits of hers, there was one which had obtained a wide circulation. It was related that one day the Empress, talking to a wounded officer who had been brought to her own hospital at Tsarskoie Selo, had asked him the name of the German regiment against which he had been fighting. The officer had replied that it was a Hessian regiment, upon which Alexandra Feodorovna had turned her back upon him, and had left the room in a violent rage which she had not even tried to control or to dissimulate.
The Grand Duchess Victoria was not discouraged by the manner in which her disclosures had been received by Nicholas II., and she had attempted to discuss the subject with the Empress, but the latter, at her first words, had stopped her with the remark: “The people whom you advise us to take into our confidence, are the enemies of the dynasty. I have been for twenty-two years upon the throne, and I know Russia well. We are beloved by the nation, and no one will ever dare raise his hand against us. All this opposition about which you are talking proceeds from a few aristocratic bridge players, and is devoid of any importance.” After this, there was nothing to be done but to allow events to take their course, and to proceed.
Copyright, Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
Meeting Addressed by Nikolai Lenine in Front of Winter Palace, Petrograd
They were to develop far quicker than one could have imagined. The army had begun to discuss the position, and to comment upon it. Every one who had watched the march of affairs during the last months, felt that something was going to happen, but no one knew what it would be, or wished even to know it, so general was the discouragement that had taken hold of the public mind. There was, however, one factor left, which towered over the whole of the situation; that was the sincere desire on the part of the different political parties to try and keep back as long as possible a crisis which was recognised to have become inevitable, but which no one wished to see hastened. This feeling was such a general one that a member of the Duma, who for family reasons had come for a few days to Stockholm where I was residing at the time just before the Revolution, told me that no one had been more surprised than he when the news had reached him that it had broken out, because, though he had been convinced it was going to produce itself, yet he had never believed that it could take place so soon.
Whilst this fearful storm was brooding on the horizon and getting nearer and nearer to him with each day that passed, Nicholas II. refused to listen to the thunder which was already resounding close to his ears, and was getting more and more determined to persist in the fatal resolution of holding his own against the tempest, and if necessary of using force in order to conjure and to subdue it. If ever the old Latin proverb, “Quod Deus vult perdere, prius dementat,” has ever been realised, it was in the case of this unfortunate Sovereign, who had fallen into the hands of an ambitious, cold woman, devoid of intelligence and of scruples, and incapable of appreciating the character of the people over whom she had been called upon to reign, and of whom she had been unable to conquer either the esteem, the respect or the affection, during the quarter of a century that she had lived in its midst.