Rasputin and the Russian Revolution

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

This discredited Monarch, and his hated and despised Empress, by whom were they surrounded during those eventful days which preceded their fall? Who were the people whom they trusted, and on whom they relied? Whom do we see advising them? Only a handful of flatterers, of sycophants, always ready to turn against him and to betray them at the first opportunity, together with Ministers devoid of any political sense, and without any knowledge or comprehension of the position into which the country had been allowed to drift; without any courage or energy, incapable of imposing themselves or their opinions upon the masses, and of convincing them of the soundness of their views; incapable even of subduing these masses by the use of sheer force. Apart from these flatterers and these weak advisers, whom could Nicholas II. and his Consort trust and believe in? Whom had they got beside them? A discontented army, that was too thoroughly weary of seeing itself neglected and passed over like a negligible quantity, whilst it was fighting for dear life on the frontiers, and who had lost all wish to go on with what appeared to it to have become a hopeless struggle; a few functionaries who cared for nothing but their own advantage or advancement; a handful of adventurers in quest of places, influence and riches, especially of the latter; a police always ready to listen to every kind of low denunciation; that had abused its power, that had destroyed, thanks to its criminal activity, every sense of personal security in the nation, and that prosecuted only those who did not pay it sufficiently to leave them alone. Blackmailers, spies, and valets; this was all that was left to the Czar of All the Russias, to watch over him. They were the only people on whom he could rely, and even they would only remain faithful to him as long as the supreme power would remain, at least nominally, in his hands. His family, as we have seen, detested the Empress, and was ready and prepared to side against him on the first notice of his downfall, which it effectively did. What was left in Petrograd of aristocracy had withdrawn itself from him, lamenting over evils which it knew itself powerless to allay, and had come to the sad conclusion that the further it kept from Tsarskoie Selo the better it would be for everybody. The Emperor stood alone, forsaken by all those who under different circumstances would have considered themselves but too honoured to die for him, let alone defend him against his foes. Alexandra Feodorovna had created a desert around her husband, and, thanks to her, there was hardly a Russian left in the world who did not for some reason or other curse the Sovereign whom Providence had destined to become in all human probability the last of the Romanoff’s crowned in Moscow. Nicholas II. imagined that he could rely on the devotion and the loyalty of his army. He forgot that this army was no longer the one that had acclaimed him with such enthusiasm at the beginning of the war. Most of the officers who had been in command of it at the time had fallen on some battle field or other; the soldiers too had disappeared, and the young recruits who had taken their place had been reared in different ideas, and were ignorant of the old discipline which had inspired the former regiments whose original contingents had been slain. The army had become a national one from the Imperialist it had been before; it was composed of the same elements of discontented minds who before they had been called to the colours had freely discussed the conditions under which the war was being fought, and who had noticed better than it would have been possible for them to do at the front, the mistakes of those in command, the remorseless dilapidation of the Public Exchequer which was going on everywhere, together with all the faults and the carelessness that had brought about all the disasters which had fallen upon the nation. This army could no longer nurse, in regard to the Czar, the veneration and almost religious respect which had animated it in earlier days. It had perceived at last that he was not at the height of the duties and responsibilities which had devolved upon him, and as a natural consequence of the fall of the scales from its eyes it had sided against him, together with the Duma, from which it was hoping and expecting the salvation which its masters of the present hour were unable to procure for it.

But whilst the whole of Russia was aware of this state of things, Nicholas II. alone refused to see it. He felt afraid of appearing as the weak man that he really was; he refused all the urgent entreaties which were addressed to him, to appeal to his people, and to appoint a popular and responsible Ministry, capable once he had called it to power of requiring from him the fulfilment of his former promises, which he had determined beforehand never to keep. He threw himself from right to left, and from left to right, in quest of councillors after his own heart, or rather after the heart of the Empress, because it was she who finally decided everything; and he changed his Ministers with a facility which was the more deplorable that those of the morrow did not differ from the ones whom he had dismissed the day before, until at last, thanks to his irresolution and to his obstinacy, he contrived to discredit, not only in Russia, but also abroad and among his Allies, the government of which he was the head, together with his own person and the great Imperial might which he personified. At last even the extreme conservative parties, who until then had been on his side, joined the ranks of his enemies, and this defection of theirs made the disaster an irremediable one, and the fatal catastrophe inevitable.

England at this moment made an effort to save the Czar, together with his dynasty. Lord Milner, who had repaired to Petrograd to attend the conference of the Allies which was being held there, tried to open the eyes of Nicholas II. as to the dangers which surrounded him, and to persuade him to grant at last a constitutional government to his people, and to entrust the interests of the country to a Cabinet in possession of its confidence. His representations proved absolutely useless. The Emperor replied to him that if the troubled state of public opinion persisted, he would establish a military dictature. He forgot in saying so that in order to carry an attempt of the kind it is indispensable to have at one’s hand a man strong enough to accept the responsibility of such a post, and an army faithful and loyal enough to back him up. Protopopoff, whom the Empress consulted as to the wisdom of the decision which Lord Milner had implored the Czar to take, declared that he thought it would be an extremely dangerous one to adopt, and that the only thing which could and ought to be done, in the present circumstances, was to resort to rigorous measures; to prorogue the Duma and the Council of State; and to repress without the least mercy every demonstration against the government. He added that he was quite ready to assume the responsibility of the repression which he advised, and if the necessity for doing so presented itself, to give orders to the police to fire on the crowds. At the same time he inundated the capital, and even the provinces, with a whole army of spies, whose only occupation consisted in denouncing to him all the people who did not pay them sufficiently well to leave them alone. A kind of committee of public safety, such as had existed in France at the time of the Terror, became, thanks to Mr. Protopopoff, the sole master of the Russian Empire, and it disposed, according to its fancy, of the existence as well as of the property and liberty of the most peaceful citizens. During one night, fifty workmen belonging to the group that was sitting in the industrial war committee, entrusted with the fabrication of ammunitions, as representatives of the labour party, were arrested, without any other apparent reason than the fact that they had allowed themselves to discuss in public the debates which had taken place in the Duma, and had been overheard by some spy or other.

This Assembly had met on the 27th of February, 1917, as had already been settled before the resignation of Mr. Sturmer, and the appointment of Prince Galitzyne as Prime Minister in his place. It became evident from the very first day the Session was opened that most violent discussions were about to take place, and that the government would never be able to command a majority, because even the ultra Conservatives who had backed it up before had forsaken it. One more reason for discontent with it had arisen: the almost total lack of food in Petrograd, where, thanks to the mismanagement of the railways and the lack of tracks, no provisions of any kind could arrive. Riots of a more or less serious character took place in different quarters of the town; the population clamoured for bread, and broke the windows in the bakers’ and butchers’ shops, wherever it could do so. This was one more complication added to all those already existing. The Duma thought it indispensable to make an energetic manifestation of its want of confidence in the government’s power to grapple with the difficulties of the situation. The parties composing the moderate left, together with the Cadets that had recently united themselves into one group denominated the “Bloc,” declared by the mouth of their leader, Mr. Chidlovsky, that it was indispensable to call together a Cabinet comprising really national elements, in possession of the confidence of the country as well as that of the Sovereign, because the one in existence was entirely discredited, even among its former supporters. During the debates which followed upon this motion, the socialist deputies, among others Mr. Tcheidze, expressed themselves in most violent terms, and said, among other things, that the government then in power would never understand the wishes or the needs of the nation, or become reconciled with it, and that between it and the country there existed an abyss which nothing in the world could ever fill. It had against it the whole of Russia, and it had done nothing and was doing nothing to smooth over the difficulties which it had itself created, and for which it was alone responsible. And Mr. Tcheidze concluded his speech by expressing his conviction that a compromise was no longer possible, and that only a great national movement of revolt could overturn the Cabinet and replace it by another one better able to understand the needs of the country and of the army.

One of the leaders of the extreme right who, up to that time, had been famous for his reactionary opinions and sympathies, Mr. Pourichkievitsch, went even further than his socialist colleague, and proceeded to sketch the character of Mr. Protopopoff, accusing him of spending his time in suspecting everybody (the zemstvos, the aristocracy, the Duma, and even the Council of State) of conspiracies against his person, and of meditating the suppression of these two institutions within a short time. Mr. Pourichkievitsch added that in what concerned the Duma he was personally convinced that it would prefer a dissolution to the alternative of a blind submission to a tyrant like the Minister of the Interior, and of keeping silent when it knew that the Fatherland was in danger.

Another speaker of great talent, Mr Efremoff, said that he had come with great regret to the conclusion that all means at the disposal of a parliamentary assembly to fight the government had been exhausted, and that the whole country was a prey to deep dissatisfaction with the existing order of things. It was high time, he added, that the system which had ruled Russia for such a long time should give way before a responsible cabinet, the constitution of which was claimed imperatively by public opinion. It was only such a cabinet that would be able to encourage the country to go on with the struggle in which it found itself engaged, against a foe who had obtained so many advantages over it, thanks to the mistakes and to the crimes of the administration represented by Mr. Protopopoff, and by his friends.

But it was the leader of the Cadets, Mr. Miliukoff, the greatest statesman that Russia possesses at the present moment, who dealt the last blow to the Ministry, thanks to the acerb criticisms which he addressed to the Sovereign and to the latter’s advisers, and to his indignant protest against the arbitrary imprisonment of the delegates of the workmen of Petrograd, who had been chosen by them to represent their interests in the industrial war commission. The vice president of this commission, Mr. Konovaloff, joined him in this protest, whilst another deputy belonging to the extreme left, whose name was to become famous very soon, Mr. Kerensky, in language of a violence such as had never been heard before in the Duma, prophesied that the time would soon come when this Duma would find itself compelled to fight for its rights and for the liberty of the nation, and would adopt decisive measures to put an end to the danger which was threatening the great work of the national defence, if it was allowed to remain in the hands and under the control of people who had so badly understood its claims and its necessities.

After these debates, during which had been voted by an immense majority the immediate release of the arrested workmen, Mr. Protopopoff rushed to Tsarskoie Selo, the metropolitan Pitirim, and Mr. Sturmer (who had remained a persona grata at Court, notwithstanding the fact that he had been compelled to resign his former functions of Prime Minister) accompanied him. A conference took place between them and the Empress, towards the close of which Nicholas II. was asked to come in and to listen to the decisions that had been arrived at, which he was requested to sanction. This conference decided that the negotiations already engaged with Germany in view of the conclusion of a separate peace should be hastened; that the Duma should be prorogued for an indefinite period of time, and the police armed with machine guns, in order to be able to crush at once, by a display of its forces, every popular manifestation that might be attempted in favour of a change of government, should such manifestation take place in the capital.

Here I am touching in this short sketch of the Russian Revolution upon a point which is still dark, the point concerning this separate peace with Germany, about which there arose at that time so much talk in Petrograd. The idea of a step of that kind, which would have constituted an arrant treason in regard to the Allies of Russia, had been conceived first in the brain of Mr. Sturmer, to whom most probably it had been suggested by his confidential friend and secretary, Mr. Manassevitsch-Maniuloff, about whom I have already spoken in the first part of this book, and who, after the murder of Rasputin, had been finally brought to trial and sentenced to eighteen months hard labour for blackmail. He had always been in the employ of Germany, and he had spoken to his patron of the necessity for putting an end to a war which, if it went on much longer, might endanger the very existence of the dynasty. Mr. Sturmer had also sympathies for the “Vaterland,” and he was but too glad to act according to the hints which were given to him by a man in whom he had every confidence. He found an unexpected ally in Rasputin, who in his turn induced the Empress through Madame Vyroubieva to rally herself to his opinion, which was a relatively easy thing to do, considering the fact that she had been already, of her own accord, working towards a reconciliation between the Romanoffs and the Hohenzollerns, the only people whom she thought of any consequence in the whole affair. The difficulty consisted, however, in finding a person willing and disposed to act as intermediary in so grave a matter. Rasputin knew Protopopoff, discussed the subject with him, and found him quite ready to enter into the views which he expounded to him.

At that time Mr. Protopopoff was vice president of the Duma. No one knew exactly how he had contrived to secure his election as such, considering his reputation of reactionary and especially of opportunist. He had, however, succeeded in getting himself appointed, and the fact that he held this position gave him a certain weight and prestige abroad. He was given very precise instructions as to what he was to do, and started with several of his colleagues of the Duma for England, under the pretext of returning the visit which some members of the English House of Commons had paid to Petrograd a few months earlier. On his way back, he stopped at Stockholm as I have already related, conferred there with an agent of the German Foreign Office called Mr. Warburg, and settled with him the conditions under which an eventual peace could be concluded. After this Protopopoff returned to Russia, where, however, the story of his Swedish intrigues had already become known so that he was awarded a very poor welcome by his friends. People believed then that his political career had come to an end, when, just at this juncture, the most important post in the Russian Empire, that of Minister of the Interior, became vacant, thanks to the dismissal of Mr. Chvostoff who had tried to get rid of Rasputin with the help of the monk Illiodore, and, to the general stupefaction of the world, the place was offered to Mr. Protopopoff by the Empress herself.