THE IMPERIAL PALACE OF TSARSKOË-CELO
Empress of bringing bad luck to everyone; but even at Darmstadt she was considered a bird of ill-omen.
As for Nicholas II. he has become completely imbecile, if rumour is correct, and will never recover his reason; the best thing that could have happened, perhaps, as far as he is concerned.
During his imprisonment at Tsarskoë-Celo, the revolutionary party was obliged often to change the soldiers who guarded him in order to be sure of their fidelity to the new regime, so great was known to be the ascendancy of the “Little Father” over his soldiers.
When he left the Palace for exile, many people knelt and piously crossed themselves as he passed, just as they would had they been shown a holy picture with miraculous powers. That which had been the religion of these humble people, they retained still for their Emperor who was losing his throne through his family affections, obstinacy and weakness.
The outcome of the first Revolution had for result the creation of the Duma, which was intended to be the Saviour and Regenerator of the Empire—it has witnessed its end. Gapon, the idol of the masses, the precursor of Rasputin, appears no more but as a shadow pale, and fugitive.
The outcome of the second Revolution has been the fall of the Romanoffs and the institution of a self-styled Republic, which it was said would bring glory in the field of battle and happy liberty to a great people. I never believed it.
May the damaged walls of the Kremlin express to this great people—whose passions were being let loose at the same time that they were being deceived—the shame felt by them at the sight of the blood spilt around them, blood shed among brothers by a Revolution which has brought them only a civil war and mortal struggles, and will soon have produced more victims than all the Romanoffs together have done with their sentences of exile to Siberia—many but too well deserved, though accounted to them as a crime.