Turning Points of the Russian Revolution
Was Revolution Inevitable?
Tony Brenton
was revolution inevitable?
was revolution inevitable?
TURNING POINTS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
EDITED BY TONY BRENTON
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Tony Brenton 2017
First published in Great Britain by Profile Books.
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Русский бунт, бессмысленный и беспощадный (Russian revolt, mindless and merciless) A. S. Pushkin
CONTENTS
A Note to the Reader ix
Chronology x
Acknowledgements xvii
Map xviii
Introduction Tony Brenton 1
1900-1920 Foreign intervention: The long view
Dominic Lieven 11
September 1911 The assassination of Stolypin
Simon Dixon 29
June 1914 Grigory Rasputin and the outbreak of the
First World War
Douglas Smith 48
March 1917 The last Tsar
Donald Crawford 66
April-July 1917 Enter Lenin
Sean McMeekin 91
August 1917 The Kornilov affair: A tragedy of errors
Richard Pipes 109
October 1917 The 'harmless drunk': Lenin and the
October insurrection
Orlando Figes 123
January 1918 The short life and early death of
Russian democracy: The Duma and the Constituent Assembly
Tony Brenton 142
July 1918 Rescuing the Tsar and his family
Edvard Radzinsky 163
August 1918 Fanny Kaplan's attempt to kill Lenin
Martin Sixsmith 178
November 1918 Sea change in the Civil War
Evan Mawdsley 200
March 1920 The fate of the Soviet countryside
Erik C. Landis 218
February 1922 The 'Bolshevik Reformation'
14 1917-1922
Catriona Kelly 244
The rise of Leninism: The death of political pluralism in the post-revolutionary Bolshevik party
Richard Sakwa 262
Afterword
284
Lenin and yesterday's utopia Tony Brenton
Notes
Dramatis Personae
Contributors
302 331
337
339
Index
A NOTE TO THE READER
Prior to February 1918 Russia still used the Julian calendar (so called Old Style, OS) which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar (New Style, NS) to which it then switched, bringing it in line with the West. Throughout this book dates for events in Russia are given Old Style up to February 1918 and New Style thereafter. In case of ambiguity we make clear whether OS or NS.
CHRONOLOGY
9 Jan: Bloody Sunday.
Jan: Major wave of strikes and disturbances (continuing through year).
May: Battle of Tsushima, culminating Russian defeat in war with Japan.
5 Sept (NS): Treaty of Portsmouth ends Russo-Japanese war.
Oct: Witte offers draft political reforms to Tsar.
17 Oct: Tsar announces package of political reforms, including creation of Duma.
16 April: Witte, having lost Tsar's confidence, resigns as Prime Minister.
April: New Fundamental laws made public; Stolypin Minister of Interior.
April: First Duma opens.
8 July: First Duma dissolved; Stolypin Prime Minister.
Aug-Nov: First round of Stolypin reforms.
20 Feb: Second Duma opens.
March: Stolypin announces further reforms.
2 June: Second Duma dissolved; new electoral law.
7 Nov: Third Duma opens, runs to 1912.
1 Sept: Stolypin shot; dies four days later.
15 Nov: Fourth Duma opens.
29 June: Assassination attempt on Rasputin.
1 Aug (NS): Germany declares war on Russia.
Late August: Major Russian defeats in Germany.
April-July: Germans invade Poland. A number of ministers, including Minister of war, replaced.
19 July: Duma reconvened for six weeks.
Aug: Unavailing demand from Ministers that Tsar let Duma form cabinet.
Aug: Tsar takes command of armed forces. Moves to HQat Mogilev. Period of 'Tsaritsa Government' begins.
3 Sept: Duma prorogued.
Jan-Nov: Empress/Rasputin oversee stream of rapid ministerial changes, including Minister of War, Interior Minister and Prime Minister (twice).
1 Nov: Duma reconvenes. Major attack by Kerensky on Rasputin and by Miliukov on top level 'stupidity or treason'.
17 Dec: Rasputin murdered.
27 Dec: Yet another new Prime Minister.
14 Feb: Duma reconvenes.
23-24 Feb: Demonstrations in Petrograd provoked by bread shortage.
Feb: Demonstrations turn violent. Tsar (in Mogilev) orders suppression by force.
Feb: Army fires on crowd, killing forty. Part of garrison mutinies in protest. Tsar dismisses as panic Rodzyanko's telegraphed demand for new government.
Feb: Most of Petrograd in hands of mutinous troops. Duma prorogued, but sets up 'Temporary Committee'. Government dissolving. Tsar orders General Ivanov to proceed to Petrograd and put mutiny down. Organising meeting for Petrograd Soviet.
Feb: Tsar sets out for Tsarskoe Selo. First meeting of Petrograd Soviet. Disturbances spread to Moscow.
March: Imperial train diverted to Pskov. Arrives in the evening. Tsar,
at urging of Alexeev, agrees to Duma based ministry and cancels Ivanov's mission. Meanwhile Duma and Soviet agree principles for establishment of Provisional Government. Formation of Moscow Soviet. 'Order No. 1' effectively strips military officers of most of their authority.
March: Provisional Government formed under Prince Lvov.
Rodzyanko cables Ruzsky in Pskov to say abdication necessary. In course of morning Alexeev and other commanders endorse that advice. Nicholas accepts this and sends telegrams declaring Alexis Tsar. But with arrival of representatives of Duma changes mind and nominates Grand Duke Michael instead.
March: Michael decides not to accept crown. End of Romanov
dynasty.
8 March: Nicholas returns to Tsarskoe Selo under arrest. Late March: Britain withdraws offer of asylum to imperial family. 3 April: Lenin arrives in Petrograd, demands 'All power to the Soviets'.
20-21 April: 'April Days' - Petrograd riots, instigated by Bolsheviks, against Provisional Government, and particularly Foreign Minister Miliukov.
4-5 May: Formation of coalition government including socialist leaders. Miliukov out. Kerensky Minister of War.
16 June: Disastrous 'Kerensky Offensive' launched.
20-30 June: Rising tension in Petrograd as troops ordered to front.
3-4 July: 'July Days'. Military mutiny. Demonstrators occupy
Petrograd and threaten to overthrow Government. Lenin fails to give decisive lead. Demonstration fizzles out. Loyal troops arrive.
5 July: Lenin goes back into exile. Other Bolshevik leaders arrested.
7 July: Lvov resigns and names Kerensky as Prime Minister.
18 July: Kornilov appointed Commander in Chief.
31 July: imperial family depart for Tobolsk.
Aug: Elections and convocation of Constituent Assembly put back
to November.
26-27 Aug: Kerensky secures dictatorial powers, pronounces Kornilov traitor. Kornilov mutinies.
30 Aug: Release of imprisoned Bolsheviks ordered.
1 Sept: Kornilov arrested.
Oct: Bolshevik Central Committee, with Lenin present, votes to prepare to seize power.
20-25 Oct: Bolsheviks in effect take control of Petrograd garrison.
24 Oct: Lenin, in disguise, makes way to Smolny in evening. Persuades Bolsheviks to launch coup.
25-26 Oct: 'Storming ofWinter Palace'. Kerensky escapes to front to seek support. Other ministers arrested. Non-Bolshevik parties walk out of Congress of Soviets when announcement is made. Bolshevik government (Sovnarkom) with Lenin as chairman set up.
Oct: Opposition press outlawed.
Oct - 2 Nov: Various anti-Bolshevik strikes and military actions (particularly in Moscow) overcome.
12-30 Nov: Elections to Constituent Assembly. Socialist revolutionaries get 40 per cent, Bolsheviks 25 per cent.
20 Nov (OS): Armistice negotiations begin at Brest-Litovsk.
Nov: Demonstration in favour of Constituent Assembly. Constitutional Democrats banned and leaders arrested.
Dec: Cheka established.
Late December: Generals Alexeev and Kornilov found 'Volunteer' (ie White) Army.
1918
5 Jan: Meeting of Constituent Assembly. Demonstration in support repressed. Assembly closed down late that night, and locked out the following morning.
15 Jan - 3 March: Conclusion of Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Lenin presses colleagues for acceptance of punitive terms, but only prevails when Germans renew their military offensive and demand even more concessions.
Early March: Bolshevik government moves to Moscow in face of German threat to Petrograd.
9 March: Allied contingent lands in Murmansk. This is the first of a series of allied interventions, eventually in support of the Whites, in NW Russia, Ukraine and the Far East. Final withdrawal in the West in Aug 1919, and by the Japanese from Vladivostok in Oct 1922.
26 March: Trotsky becomes War Commissar. Over next few weeks overcomes fierce party resistance to recruit former Tsarist officers to Red Army.
12 April: Kornilov killed in action. Denikin takes over command.
26 April: Nicholas and family sent to Ekaterinburg.
9 May: First Bolshevik efforts to requisition grain from peasants.
May: Czech Legion in Chelyabinsk refuses to disarm. Align themselves with Whites. Take over Trans-Siberian railroad.
June: Czechs occupy Samara. Komuch formed.
12-13 June: Grand Duke Michael murdered in Perm.
16-17 July: Murder of Nicholas II and family in Ekaterinburg.
30 Aug: Fanny Kaplan attempts to kill Lenin.
5 Sept: Red Terror launched. Widespread massacres of prisoners and hostages.
23 Sept: Anti-Bolshevik 'Provisional All Russian Government', notionally answerable to Komuch, formed in Omsk.
11 Nov: Armistice ends World War I. Germany rapidly abandons gains in Eastern Europe, most of which over the next two years are reclaimed by Russia.
18 Nov: Kolchak coup in Omsk effectively makes him military dictator of White cause.
January: 'Razverstka', policy of grain requisition from peasants, formally introduced.
March-May: Kolchak launches offensive in Siberia. Initially
successful, almost reaching the Volga. But halted by mid-May and then forced into retreat.
July-Oct: Denikin launches offensive against Red Army in South, and Yudenich in North West. Both initially make good progress, with Denikin approaching Tula and Yudenich almost taking Petrograd, but by October are forced into retreat.
14 Nov: Kolchak retreats to Irkutsk. Yudenich disbands his army.
17 Dec: Kolchak forced to resign, Subsequently he is handed over to the Bolsheviks and shot (7 Feb 1920).
27 March: Denikin abandons command. Vrangel takes over.
August: Tambov rising of peasants against grain requisitioning, followed by a spate of similar risings elsewhere.
7 Nov:White army under Vrangel evacuates via Crimea. End of Civil War.
March: A spate of demonstrations against food shortages culminates in the naval uprising at Kronstadt, brutally put down. The Communist Party bans factions within it, paving the way for total dictatorship, but also abandons grain requisitioning and so initiates the New Economic Policy (NEP).
16 February: Decree on confiscation of church valuables marks start of Bolshevik campaign against Church. Patriarch Tikhon publicly opposes campaign.
3 April: Stalin becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party, the basis for his future dominance.
26 May: Lenin has first major stroke.
June: Metropolitan Veniamin and a number of other priests tried for counterrevolutionary activity and subsequently shot.
Dec: 'League of Militant Godless' established.
1923-24
Lenin, increasingly incapacitated by a series of strokes, dies 21 January 1924. He leaves a testament recommending (with reservations) Trotsky as his successor, and arguing that Stalin should be demoted.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost I must thank the contributors to this book. They agreed to take on what for a professional historian was an offbeat, if not suspect, task. They have delivered magnificently.
I owe extra thanks to two of them. Orlando Figes has been encouraging from the start and offered me many useful tips in my search for contributors. Dominic Lieven was kind enough to read through my own draft chapter and offer a professional commentary to remedy my amateurisms. The defects that remain are of course mine alone.
For the Afterword I needed the advice of someone with a deep knowledge of today's Russia. Duncan Allan was exactly the right person to turn to, and could not have been more helpful. Again the remaining faults belong exclusively to me.
The whole team at Profile have been splendid, but I must mention two names in particular. The late Peter Carson enthused about my original concept and was crucial in enabling me to run with it. He is still widely missed, including by me. And Nick Sheerin picked the project up and has worked tirelessly at bringing it to fruition. In many ways he is co-editor of this book.
Finally, my family; Sue, Tim, Kate and Jenny. They have over the years had to put up with a lot because of my obsession with Russia. This book is dedicated to them.
• xvll •
RUSSIA IN 1917
was revolution inevitable?
INTRODUCTION
tony brenton
We are approaching the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. If one had to pick the single event which has most shaped twentieth- century history, and so our world in the early years of the twenty-first, this must be it. The Revolution put in power the totalitarian communism that eventually ruled one third of the human race, stimulated the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, and thus the Second World War, and created the great antagonist the West faced for the forty years Cold War balance of terror. It is hard to think of another example where the events of a few years, concentrated in one country, and mostly in one city, have had such vast historical consequences.
The events of 1917 have themselves become a historical battlefield. For seventy years it was a core Soviet belief that the revolution was the triumphant product of ineluctable historical forces. That view may now look quaint but, in a softer version, it has held extensive sway among Western historians. In this view tsarism was rotten and doomed, socialism, even Bolshevism, offered Russia a bright new future, and it was Stalin who corrupted the dream. Others have taken a much less sympathetic standpoint. They argue that there was a liberal alternative to tsarism, which the Bolsheviks strangled at birth, that it was Lenin who created the dictatorship and the terror, and that Stalin was no more than his apt pupil. And there are lots of other variants. In one, tsarism was on the way to modernising Russia, and liberalism would inevitably have followed had the revolution not stopped it in its tracks. In another, Russia's whole historic tradition is of state-dominated tyranny, and the regime made by Lenin just the latest manifestation.
Where you come out on all these grand questions depends heavily on how you view what happened in Russia in the years surrounding 1917. Could things have gone differently? Were there moments when a single decision taken another way, a random accident, a shot going straight instead of crooked (or vice versa) could have altered the whole course of Russian, and so European, and world, history?
This book picks out those moments in the history of the revolution where that feeling of contingency is particularly intense. These are the forks in the road where one senses that there genuinely was a question over which way things would go. For each of these moments a distinguished historian has been invited to describe the background, significance and consequences of the event as it happened, and also to speculate a little as to how things might have gone otherwise. This is not a full narrative history of the revolution (there are plenty of excellent ones already) but rather a series of snapshots that catch a very tangled series of events at key moments and ask whether the story might have been radically different.
II
Before presenting our snapshots it may be helpful to put them in context.
The revolution did not come out of the blue. The problems of a backward-looking autocracy struggling to navigate a period of rapid social and economic change were not unique to Russia. They have produced revolutions before, notably in France in 1789 (an example constantly on the minds of the Russian revolutionaries). In Russia's case, the dress rehearsal for the events of 1917 took place in 1905. The year 1904 had seen a 'perfect storm': military defeat by the Japanese; impoverishment and discontent in the countryside; appalling living and working conditions in the cities; and the spread of socialist and democratic ideas (often in an extremely virulent form) among the intelligentsia. These came together on 'Bloody Sunday' (9 January 1905) when the Imperial Guard in St Petersburg gunned down hundreds of unarmed demonstrators. The result was a mortal blow to the credibility of Nicholas II and his regime. Massive nationwide strikes and demonstrations forced the tsar to accept the first-ever representative assembly in Russian history, the Duma. This concession brought a few years of precarious stability. In our first snapshot, Dominic Lieven looks at how things might have gone if the 1905 revolution had turned into full-scale social collapse, as it in fact did twelve years later.
The next few years saw a bitter tug of war between a Tsar who (encouraged by his uncompromising wife and their resident 'holy man', Rasputin) was intent on maintaining his autocratic power, and a series of Dumas (regularly disbanded and reconstituted by Nicholas in what he hoped would be a more helpful way) demanding economic and political reform. The one statesman of the period who showed any capacity to master these conflicting forces was Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister 1906-11. Stolypin was an 'authoritarian moderniser' - admired in particular by Vladimir Putin - who tried to use the Tsar's authority to bring about the economic reforms which Russia so badly needed. These efforts ended with Stolypin's assassination in 1911. Simon Dixon in his chapter looks at Stolypin's impact, and asks how events might have evolved if he had not gone to the Kiev opera that night.
With the abandonment of serious efforts at reform, the one thing that temporarily allayed rising social disorder and discontent was Russia's entry into the First World War in 1914. As so often happened (and, indeed, still does today), Russian society pulled together in the face of a common enemy. Strikes stopped, agitators were jailed, there were huge patriotic demonstrations. But in the longer term the war, which brought military humiliation and rising economic dislocation, was the final nail in the coffin of the tsarist regime. Douglas Smith looks at the little-known role of Rasputin in talking Nicholas out of entering an earlier Balkan war, and his efforts to dissuade him in 1914 as well. Not only Russia but the world too would be a very different place if he had succeeded.
He of course didn't. The war took Nicholas far away from Petrograd (the new, patriotic, name of St Petersburg) to command his troops.
Government was left in the capricious and incompetent hands of the empress Alexandra and Rasputin, about whom all sorts of scandalous rumours circulated. The standing of the Tsar reached rock bottom; even members of his family were plotting to remove him. Rising popular discontent came to a head with bread riots in Petrograd in February 1917. After some attempts at suppression the army joined the rioters. Nicholas's attempt from his distant headquarters to send in relief forces failed. His generals now advised him that the only way to save the dynasty, and Russia, was for him to abdicate in favour of his son Alexis. Concerned about Alexis' health, Nicholas tried instead to pass the crown to his brother, Michael. But Michael was unacceptable to the civilian politicians in Petrograd who, as the Provisional Government, were to inherit real power. Thus through a chapter of accidents, as described by Donald Crawford, the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an end.
The fall of the Romanovs precipitated the rise of the 'Soviets' (directly elected assemblies of soldiers, peasants and industrial workers) in Petrograd and other cities. As the economic and political situation deteriorated these assemblies were increasingly radicalised. The extremist Bolshevik faction in particular rapidly gained influence. The Provisional Government, drawn from traditional tsarist-era politicians, found itself having to work in uneasy deference to the Petrograd Soviet (which at any time could bring the city to a halt with strikes and demonstrations). In this atmosphere, the German Foreign Ministry, wanting Russia out of the war, arranged the return to Russia of the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, in his famous 'sealed train'. He swiftly overcame reluctance among his fellow Bolsheviks and electrified the political scene with his strident (but widely echoed) demands that the Provisional Government be overthrown and the war ended. With German financial help he was able to bolster Bolshevik support and build Bolshevik forces on the streets (the so-called 'Red Guards'). The Bolsheviks set about propagandising and weakening the Russian armed forces, so contributing to a series of Russian military defeats and mutinies. This activity culminated in an attempted Bolshevik seizure of power in July, which failed. Many Bolsheviks were arrested and Lenin went back into exile. Sean McMeekin analyses Lenin's role in these months, and asks what course events might have taken if there had been no sealed train.
The failed Bolshevik coup exacerbated the mutual suspicions between the left (as represented in the Petrograd Soviet) and the right (as represented in the Provisional Government). Alexander Kerensky, a charismatic left-wing politician but with solid ministerial credentials, took over the Provisional Government in July as the only figure acceptable to the two sides. He chose as the new head of the armed forces the respected patriot General Kornilov who was charged with a mission of reimposing discipline and prosecuting the war. But, through a series of disastrous misunderstandings described in Richard Pipes's chapter, Kerensky came to see Kornilov as an aspiring military dictator. He accordingly swung left, engineered a surge of socialist support against the 'counter-revolution' (including having the recently arrested Bolsheviks released - but not readmitting Lenin), and at the end of August 1917 had Kornilov dismissed and arrested. The price he paid was the loss of army support for his government and a leap in the popularity of the Bolsheviks (who at this point became the majority party in the Petrograd Soviet). The way was now open for them to seize power.
The key moment was the evening of 24 October 1917. A congress of all the Soviets from around the country was due to meet in the Smolny Palace the next day. This would duly have thrown the Provisional Government out and replaced it with a coalition of all the socialist parties (not just the Bolsheviks). Lenin, now surreptitiously back in Petrograd, was determined to pre-empt this. He crossed the city in disguise. A police patrol stopped but did not recognise him. Once at the Smolny, he bullied the Bolshevik leadership (who up until this point had been actively engaged in the negotiations for a coalition) into launching an immediate takeover of power. That takeover (including the famous 'storming' of the Winter Palace) took place the following day. It was not a socialist coalition but the Bolsheviks alone who were to rule Russia.
Orlando Figes in his chapter looks at how different history would have been if that patrol had recognised and arrested Lenin.
So far the Bolsheviks only controlled Petrograd and (after a few days fighting) Moscow. But with single-minded brutality (including the establishment in December 1917 of the 'Cheka', the regime's fearsome secret police) they gradually extended their grip. In Moscow (now the capital of Russia) they squeezed rival parties out of the political process and arrested many of their leaders. In the provinces they rapidly found themselves fighting against the 'Whites', a disparate range of anti-Bolshevik forces, led by former tsarist generals and politicians, and enjoying some foreign support. At this point the Bolsheviks saw the danger of the tsar, now living in prison in Siberia with his family, becoming a 'living symbol' around which the counter-revolution could rally. Edvard Radzinsky looks at moments when the Tsar might indeed have escaped and played such a role. Fearing precisely this, the Bolsheviks had him and his family killed in Ekaterinburg in July 1918.
One of the key promises made in February by the Provisional Government, which of course had no electoral mandate, had been to proceed rapidly to the election of a 'Constituent Assembly'. Political hopes had long focused on this as the body that would create a constitution for post-Romanov Russia and install a government with proper democratic credentials. But preparations were slow. The widely anticipated elections (which even the Bolsheviks, although by now in power, could not stop) did not take place until November. The Bolsheviks got only about a quarter of the vote. Lenin condemned the results on the grounds that the interests of the revolution stood higher than 'bourgeois democracy'. The Assembly convened in Petrograd in January 1918, but within a day was closed down by Red Guards. It did not meet again. In my chapter I ask how things might have gone if the Provisional Government had been quicker.
Rising political repression, civil war and economic dislocation inevitably brought opposition to the Bolshevik regime. This received its most dramatic expression in the attempt on 30 August 1918 by a former non-Bolshevik revolutionary, Fanny Kaplan, to assassinate Lenin. She seriously wounded but did not kill him. The attempt was used as the justification for the first 'Red Terror' under which the Cheka arrested and executed tens of thousands of the regime's opponents (and created a precedent for Stalin's 'Great Terror' thirty years later). Lenin's injury probably also contributed to his early death in 1924, clearing the way for Stalin to inherit power. Martin Sixsmith tells the story of the assassination attempt and asks what the consequences could have been if Fanny Kaplan had been more, or less, accurate.
It was by no means inevitable that the Bolsheviks would win the Civil War. While by early 1918 they had established control over most of central Russia, they faced chaos and resistance, including widespread peasant aversion to their rule, in the east and south. Their 'shameful' peace treaty with the Central Powers in March 1918, which handed Ukraine and most of west Russia over to German and Austro- Hungarian occupation, did not add to their standing. The opposition to the Bolsheviks was led by a number of White generals, with some foreign support, but also, importantly, in Siberia by the 'Komuch'. This was a group of politicians, including some who were left-wing, who claimed their legitimacy as the 'All Russian Provisional Government' as former members of the disbanded Constituent Assembly. The Komuch, however, foundered in splits and divisions between its left and right wings. In a coup on 17 November 1918 it was replaced by the dictatorship of Admiral Kolchak. The right wing now dominated all the anti-Bolshevik forces - but with its reactionary political programme it had essentially nothing to offer the peasants. They therefore largely swung behind the Bolsheviks and helped ensure their eventual victory. Evan Mawdsley examines these events and asks if there was any alternative.
One of the by-products of the Civil War was 'War Communism' - the brutal imposition by the Bolsheviks oftotal control over the Russian economy and population, enforced by mass killings and arrests, which in many ways pre-figured Stalinism. A key feature of this was the 'raz- verstka' - wholesale seizure of grain from the peasants, often resulting in mass starvation. As the war drew to a close in 1919-20, this led to growing levels of peasant and provincial revolt (including the uprising in February 1921 of the Kronstadt naval garrison, formerly among the staunchest supporters of the revolution). The regime was accordingly forced to abandon the razverstka in 1921. This was the key first step towards the 'New Economic Policy' (NEP), a brief thaw and partial reversion to market economics, which brought the protests to an end and allowed the Russian economy to recover. But a significant proportion of the party detested the NEP on ideological grounds, and in 1928 Stalin as part of his ascent to power ended it and reintroduced grain seizures. Erik Landis asks if the route to Stalinism might have been altered if (as Trotsky proposed at the time) the razverstka had been ended twelve months earlier.
The Bolshevik movement was of course radically and aggressively atheist. A key test of their style of government was their handling of the Russian Orthodox Church (which enjoyed the support of the majority of Russians throughout the Communist period). In fact, while ideological hostility to the Church, and its maltreatment, was constant throughout the Communist years, there was only one real surge of active repression. This started with the confiscation of Church valuables in 1922. Catriona Kelly looks at this episode and asks what it tells us about other features of Bolshevik rule, as well as what might have been the implications of a different approach to church-state relations.
The eventual outcome of the revolution was of course totalitarian communism. Power was confined to a single ruling party: highly centralised; secretively and bureaucratically run; and dependent upon a vast repressive apparatus. Wider public debate, let alone opposition, was rigidly excluded and brutally punished. Many have argued that such an outcome was the inevitable result of the seizure of power by an extremist faction representing a small minority of the populace and driven by an eschatological ideology, which had then to retain power in the teeth of external hostility, domestic civil war and economic collapse. In the early days, however, there were hopes of an alternative under which, even if democracy outside the party was excluded, democracy within it could be maintained. Richard Sakwa looks at these alternatives and asks if they really offered a way of avoiding the totalitarian outcome.
It is hard not to see the course of the Russian revolution as deeply tragic. A fitfully, but genuinely, developing country, confronted with forces inspired by the highest hopes for mankind, plunged to quite unprecedented levels of tyranny and mass murder. Even conventional Marxist historians (a vanishing breed) now admit that the road to Utopia went seriously astray. But how 'inevitable' was that tragedy?
Let me explain this book's approach to that question. There is something of a fracas going on in the historical profession on the issue of 'counterfactual history'. Partly in response to a well-received book of counterfactual historical essays edited by Professor Niall Ferguson, Professor Richard Evans has recently written a book dismissing coun- terfactuals as, mostly, right-wing wishful thinking, often fun, but with virtually nothing to contribute to any real understanding of the past. And indeed as I sought contributors for this book a couple of eminent names declined precisely because they did not wish to play the coun- terfactual game.
Which is all very well. But in pure logic I find it very hard to understand how the inevitability, or not, of a historical event can be assessed except on the basis of a close look at moments where the road might have taken another direction, and where it might then have led. Contributors to this volume have responded to the challenge in various ways. Some have taken us some way down a route very different from the course history actually did take. Some have focused on moments of extreme contingency when even a very slight change in circumstances might plausibly have led to a dramatically different historical outcome. Some have described the chapter of accidents and misunderstandings leading to a particular outcome, leaving the reader to reflect on how different that outcome might have been. And a significant number have looked at widely touted alternatives to the way things actually went, only to conclude that in fact none of those alternatives was likely. All of these approaches seem to me to be valid. And taken together they ask, from a range of points of view, how unavoidable Russia's tragic twentieth century really was - in a way that a conventional narrative history would find it much harder to do.
It was Hegel who said that 'the one thing we learn from history is that no one learns anything from history'. I hope he was wrong. As a working diplomat I often had no other guide in analysing a particular challenge or situation than whatever relevant history I could lay my hands on. For Russia in particular (a country where I spent a lot of my career), with its famously opaque style of governance, knowledge of Russian history was often a key source of insight into current developments. The Russians, too, rely heavily on history in trying to understand where the world is going. For the revolutionaries of 1917 the key historical precedent, both positive and negative, was the French Revolution. A central aim of all the Russian revolutionaries was to avoid the emergence, as happened in France, of a military dictator - a 'Napoleon'. They succeeded. But they got Stalin instead. Was that inevitable? I leave the reader to judge.
FOREIGN INTERVENTION: THE LONG VIEW
1900-1920
dominic lieven
the 1970s, among Anglo-American historians the field was dominated by the debate between so-called optimists and pessimists. The optimists believed that the constitutional regime established in 1906-14 heralded Russia's move towards Western liberal democracy, a move which would have ended in success had not the First World War intervened and provided Lenin with the opportunity to stage what these historians saw as the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. The pessimists, on the other hand, believed that tsarism was doomed and that Bolshevism was always the likeliest victor in Russia's inevitable revolutionary crisis.
hen I first became a historian of late imperial Russia in
I believed even then that this conception of Russia's fate in 1914 as lying either with democracy or communism reflected much more the Cold War context in which the debate occurred than it did Russian realities in the early twentieth century. The debate was in many ways less Russian history than a battle between rival ideological positions within the Western intelligentsia, which was being fought out on Russian soil. The terms of the debate also illustrated the very powerful hold that the present and its concerns have on historians' thinking, above all in so highly 'relevant' and politically explosive a field as Russian history in the Cold War era.
The idea that Russia could have made a peaceful transition to liberal democracy is very wishful thinking. Russia was a great multinational empire, one of many that dominated the globe in 1900. None have survived and none have disappeared without serious conflict. Russia was also a country on Europe's poorer and less developed periphery, where middle classes and states were weaker and property less secure than in the continent's core. Confronting the onset of mass politics was much more dangerous and frightening for elites on Europe's periphery than for those at its centre. I call this periphery the Second World. Most of the countries of this world lived under authoritarian regimes after 1918 from which some of them were freed in 1945 less by their own efforts than by Anglo-American victory in the Second World War. If Spain and Italy, where liberal institutions and values were much deeper rooted than in Russia, adopted authoritarian and even semi-totalitarian regimes in the 1920s, what chance did Russian democracy have?
A Bolshevik victory in early twentieth-century Russia was likelier than a liberal democratic one but nevertheless not the likeliest outcome. For this there are many reasons. Of these perhaps the most important is the international context: it seems to me a fantasy to imagine that in peacetime the European great powers would have allowed any Russian regime to secede from the international system, set itself up as the headquarters of international socialist revolution, and repudiate today's equivalent of trillions of dollars of foreign debt, most of it owed to citizens of these great powers.
Here immediately one comes to the core of this chapter, which stresses the crucial influence of the international context on the Russian Revolution and suggests a number of possible outcomes that would have been strongly influenced by the 'international factor'. To develop this theme we must begin our story in 1905-6.
In these years Russia was rocked by a revolution that came very close to bringing down the monarchy. If one looks at events from the perspective of revolutionaries or liberals this may seem an exaggeration. The regime appeared only too durable. But that is not the view you get when you study the higher reaches of the regime from the inside and through the eyes of many of its leading officials. In these circles deep fear existed that the regime would crumble. The worst months of crisis came between October 1905 when Nicholas II granted a constitution and July 1906 when he successfully dissolved the first Duma.
The promise of a constitution in the manifesto of 17 October in no way satisfied the majority of Russian liberals. Their party, the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), continued to call for universal male suffrage, a government responsible to parliament, the expropriation of much gentry land and an amnesty for all political prisoners. The revolutionary socialist parties were totally irreconcilable from the regime's (correct) perspective and they enjoyed great support among urban workers. Meanwhile much of the countryside was in uproar as peasants burned manor houses, expropriated crops and terrorised landowners and their agents. Worst of all for Russia's rulers, its own forces were in disarray. After the October 1905 manifesto the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which guided and coordinated repression, was in a state of confusion with officials losing confidence and unclear how to act, and their agents and informants beginning to scurry for cover. Most of the navy and much of the army were unreliable as agents of repression. Even in the army, mutinies were frequent and units of the armed forces might easily become servants of the revolution rather than of the regime. Loyalty hung by a thread in many regiments, which were capable of suppressing riots one day and going on strike the next. The government knew what hopes the peasants, whose sons filled the army's ranks, placed in the first Duma: at the centre of these hopes was the expropriation of all gentry land. As the time to dissolve the Duma approached, fears mounted. On 11 June 1906 the First Battalion of the Preobrazhensky Guards, the senior unit in the Russian army, mutinied. General Alexander Kireev, usually a great optimist, wrote in his diary, 'this is it'.1
What would have happened had the army's loyalty disintegrated, with most of its other ranks refusing to obey orders or even joining the revolution? A spiral ofradicalisation would have occurred similar to that which happened in France in 1789, but it would have been more radical and more rapid. There was no chance that Russia's liberal leaders of the Kadet Party would have been able to control or channel this process. Unlike in the French Revolution, socialist doctrines and revolutionary socialist parties now existed, and indeed had put down deep roots in the Russian intelligentsia. In their determination to eliminate gentry landowning most peasants were unconscious socialists, and many workers were attracted to the socialist vision articulated by the revolutionaries. Mayhem would have been at its worst in the non-Russian areas: the Trans-Caucasus slipped largely beyond the government's control even as things turned out in the winter of 1905-6. Had the regime fallen, the process of disintegration would have gone further, with social revolution quickly taking on the additional aspect of inter- ethnic war. Elsewhere, movements for full-scale independence would only have developed in Poland and perhaps Finland, but in other non- Russian areas there would have been demands for varying degrees of local autonomy. Inevitably extremes of revolution would have caused a counter-revolutionary response, as indeed happened in 1905-7 when there was widespread support for the so-called Black Hundreds. If this process of domestic conflict had been allowed to reach its denouement it is very difficult to know when it would have stopped or which forces would ultimately have emerged victorious.
But in reality, external forces were certain not to allow a disintegrating Russia to decide its own fate and their intervention would probably have been decisive, at least in the short run. The leadership in intervention would almost necessarily have to come from Germany since it was a neighbouring power and had Europe's most formidable army. It is true that the German Chancellor, Bernhard von Bulow, dreaded having to intervene. He recalled the effect of foreign intervention in 1792-93 in uniting French nationalism with the revolution and pushing the latter to extremes. He knew too that intervention on behalf of counter-revolution in Russia would be deeply unpopular with German socialists. But the hands of Bulow and other European leaders were almost certain to be forced as Russia spiralled towards anarchy and socialism. Presumably no Russian regime in peacetime would have taken the suicidal path of repudiating debts and thereby inviting foreign intervention. But as revolution spread, the economy crashed, and capital fled, Russia would have been forced to default on its international obligations. Pre-1914 capitalists and the great powers that supported them had a tough response to defaulters. The pressure of foreign bondholders on their governments to protect their investments by backing the re-creation of a stable non-socialist regime in Russia would have been intense, especially in France, the country most affected. The thought of the German army spearheading intervention in Russia in order to protect French bondholders might have caused some unusual Franco-German solidarity for a time but in Paris this would have been far outweighed by fear that Russian power, the guarantee of French security and the European balance, was gone for the foreseeable future.
Default would spark some version of foreign intervention but the spreading violence against foreign persons and property in Russia would likely result in more immediate and drastic action. Even as it was, in the winter of 1905-6 the British consul in Riga (to take one of many possible examples) was howling for Royal Naval landing parties to protect British subjects in what we now call Latvia. Here above all, however, it would be the Germans who must lead. There were far more ethnic Germans in Russia than there were French, English, Italians or Austrians. Many of these Germans were subjects of the tsar. The most prominent were the landowning, business and professional elites of the Baltic provinces. Many of the Baltic landowning nobility in particular possessed powerful connections in Berlin. At the height of the Russian Revolution of 1905 Emperor William II told Professor Schiemann, the best-known professional middle-class Balt in Berlin, that if the tsar fell and anarchy spread in the Baltic provinces then the German army would intervene. Of course the Kaiser's promises were not government policy but in this case it is hard to see how any German government could have stood aside as ethnic Germans in neighbouring provinces were stripped of their property, saw their manor houses burned over their heads and in many cases were killed. This was already happening in the Baltic provinces but the process was stopped in its tracks by the brutal intervention of punitive Russian military expeditions from early 1906. Had the Russian monarchy fallen and its army disintegrated then arson, mayhem and murder would have become near universal and German military intervention surely unavoidable.
What would have been the result of foreign intervention? Would it, as in France in 1792-93, have led to an alliance of radicalism and nationalism in the revolutionary cause? Maybe, but it is very hard to imagine Russian property-owners allying themselves with any socialist regime committed to their expropriation. Perhaps the Russian counter-revolution would have allied itself to foreign intervention as Franco did in 1936, for all the nationalist ideology at the core of his counter-revolutionary cause. Possibly a better parallel is with Russian intervention in Hungary in 1849. The dominant ideology of Russian conservatism by 1900 was nationalism, and the Russian elites were imbued by a strong commitment to their country's power, status and honour. If restored to power on German bayonets their humiliation would have been extreme. Perhaps like Austria after 1849 a conservative Russia would have turned on its German saviour, astonishing the world - in the words of Felix Schwarzenberg - by its ingratitude.
But one must not forget the traumatic impact of Russia's collapse and German intervention on international relations in Europe and on the European balance of power. The Russian ambassador in London in 1903-16, Count Alexander Benckendorff, believed that the result of Russian disintegration and German intervention would probably be an immediate Franco-British alliance and very possibly a European war soon after. It is impossible to say whether he would have been proved correct. The one certain point is that it would have taken Russia significantly longer to recover from disintegration and foreign intervention than it actually took to restore Russian power after 1906. In that period Germany's relative power would have been greatly enhanced. If a Russian recovery was combined with nationalist anti-German frenzy (of which there was a good deal in 1906-14 even without foreign intervention) then the temptation for Berlin to seize the opportunity and go to war in order to ensure its hegemony in Europe and its security for the foreseeable future might have proved irresistible. At which point the reader might ask whether this scenario differs greatly from what actually happened. War did after all come in 1914. The key difference would have been that in my counterfactual narrative Germany almost certainly would have won the war.
It may seem that a counterfactual essay on early twentieth-century Russia that concentrates on the international context should focus on the key event of the era, namely the outbreak of the First World War. After all, endless exam questions have asked the question, 'No War, no Revolution?' This might seem all the more pressing because the current trend in historiography of the First World War's causes is to stress contingency and suggest that the war could well have been avoided. I agree up to a point. If Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated then war would probably not have occurred in 1914. The initial decision for war was made in Vienna. Facing geopolitical decline and growing nationalist challenges, Austria's rulers reacted with a combination of desperation, arrogance and miscalculation. One can find parallels with other imperial elites in similar circumstances. In many ways the Suez crisis was the '1914 moment' for the British and French empires. The key difference between 1914 and 1956 was that, whereas Washington vetoed London's adventure, Berlin not merely allowed but encouraged Vienna to strike. Once the Germans had given their 'blank cheque' to Austria on 22-23 June 1914 then war was the probable outcome.
The deeper background to the war was the struggle of empires and nationalisms, which in various forms was one of the key elements in twentieth-century history. In that sense the First World War was by no means the bolt from the blue depicted in much of the literature. At the very moment in 1914 when this struggle was spilling over into war in south-eastern Europe, it was also paralysing British government and threatening civil war in Ireland. The First World War erupted as a result of the huge and very difficult issues raised by the decline and possible fall of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. The only way that this process could have been managed peacefully was through cooperation between Russia and Germany. The so-called 'pro-Germans' in the Russian leadership urged a return to alliance with Berlin but the growing antagonism between Germany and Russia before 1914 had many causes and would have been difficult to withstand.
A war avoided in 1914 could have occurred in the following years but it could also very easily have been a different war, with Britain remaining neutral. By 1914, there were many signs of growing British detente with Berlin, and growing distrust of Russia. All of which brings us back to a big counterfactual question: what if Germany had won the war? Had Britain remained neutral, as is likely in this scenario, Germany probably would have done so. But to imagine this, it's not necessary to envisage Britain staying out of a European conflict since Germany very nearly won the First World War in any case.
The winter of 1916-17 was a decisive moment in history. Had the Germans not brought the United States into the conflict at the very moment when revolution was heralding the disintegration of Russian power then they would have had every chance of winning the First World War, with enormous implications for Russia, and Europe. So a key counterfactual question is: what if the German leadership had not opted for unrestricted submarine warfare in the winter of 1916-17 thereby bringing the United States into the conflict? The key point to bear in mind is that in order to win the First World War the Germans did not need outright victory on the western front. All that was required was stalemate in the west and victory in the east. Victory would have boiled down to something like the pre-war status quo in the west and the survival of the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk in the east, which ended the Russo-German war in March 1918. If the Germans had not brought the Americans into the war then this outcome was almost certain.
Without American or Russian assistance the French and British could never have defeated Germany. By the winter of 1916 there was a strong chance that the United States would not continue to allow Britain and France to finance their war effort by floating ever-greater loans on the American market. On its own that might not have forced a compromise peace with Germany but combined with the disintegration of Russia it would have made Allied victory impossible. American intervention made a huge difference to Allied finances but also to Allied morale in the dark days of 1917 and early 1918. By the second half of 1918 the American army was playing a major role on the western front. Even more important, the knowledge that an almost unlimited flow of American manpower would join the fight if it continued beyond 1918 was crucial to the decisions made by the German high command in 1918 and to growing German pessimism about the war's outcome.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk created a 'German order' in east-central Europe. This had huge implications for all Europeans. In the twentieth century Germany and Russia were always, at least potentially, continental Europe's greatest powers. The two world wars in Europe more than anything revolved around their competition. If either Germany or Russia were decisively weakened then the other power must dominate all of eastern and central Europe unless - as happened after 1945 but was unthinkable before then - the Americans remained fully committed to sustaining the European balance of power. In 1918 Russia's disintegration allowed Germany to dominate east-central Europe and therefore inevitably become by far the most powerful state in Europe. In 1945 the pattern was reversed. In 1989-91 a second collapse of Russian power led to German reunification. Partly as a result we are now facing - for the moment still in less dangerous circumstances - the task of feeling our way towards adapting to a German leadership in Europe which will be moderated by other powers and acceptable to Europeans and to the German people too. For reasons of both history and contemporary political economy this is a very difficult challenge and this explains many of contemporary Europe's problems.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took from Russia all the territories it had acquired since the reign of Peter the Great. In other words it was confined to its present-day borders. But the key to Brest-Litovsk lay much less in Russia's loss of the lands acquired by Peter and his successors than in the independence of Ukraine, which had become tsarist territory already in the seventeenth century. Without Ukraine, early twentieth-century Russia would cease to be a great power. Ukraine furnished most of the empire's exported grain at a time when the Russian Empire was competing with the United States to be the world's greatest grain exporter. Grain exports were the key to Russia's favourable trade balance and to the government's strategy of economic development, which in the short to medium term relied on importing foreign capital and technological know-how in exchange for grain exports. Ukraine also produced most of the empire's coal and iron, and was the centre of its metallurgical industry. Ukraine's vital economic role was enhanced by the fact that the Urals region, which Peter the Great had developed as the centre of Russia's metallurgical and defence industries, had been in decline for a century and would not recover until Stalin's industrialisation drive of the 1930s.
If Russia lost Ukraine then Germany must become Europe's hegemon. This was all the more certain because any notionally independent Ukraine could only exist as a German satellite. No Russian government would willingly tolerate Ukrainian independence and only Germany could protect Ukraine against its eastern neighbour. On top of geopolitical vulnerability Ukraine also suffered from great internal weaknesses. An independent Ukraine confronted by Bolshevik Russia could be sure of the disloyalty of Communists, Russian workers in the eastern cities and mines, and most Jews. This constituted a very sizeable part of the population, and in many eastern regions even a majority. Still worse, Ukrainian nationalism was very much a minority cause even in core central areas of Ukraine. Most of the region's peasants had no sense of Ukrainian identity. In most cases they thought of themselves as belonging to their village and to the Orthodox Church. Traditionally, to the extent that they possessed a wider sense of political identity and loyalty, this was to the tsar as protector of the Orthodox community. In the pre-war decades an increasingly bitter conflict was waged among the region's intelligentsia over the question of whether Ukrainians were a separate nation or a branch of the greater Russian community. This conflict was fought on both sides of the Russo-Austrian border since over one quarter of what we now call Ukrainians were subjects of the Habsburg emperor. The heartland of Ukrainian nationalism was in Austrian Galicia. Both Vienna and Petersburg understood the immense potential geopolitical importance of this struggle to define Ukrainian identity and to instil this definition into the Ukrainian masses as they evolved from illiterate villagers into modern citizens. The Ukrainian issue was an increasing thorn in Russo-Austrian relations, though one very little noticed in English-language historiography on the origins of the First World War.
To say that Ukraine could only exist as a German protectorate might seem to claim that the new Ukrainian state was illegitimate. I do not mean that. Given time a Ukrainian state could have used its control over the educational system to inculcate a sense of Ukrainian identity into most of its people. Independent Ukraine was certainly a more real country than, for example, the Iraqi state that Britain carved out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire, in part to guarantee its access to oil. A basic problem for many post-imperial states is that empires by definition are made up of many peoples entwined by history and geography. Unravelling them is a tricky and often brutal business. No polity is worse equipped to do this than one that combines a Westphalian insistence on absolute sovereignty with European nationalism's obsession with language, history and blood. So an independent Ukrainian state would have been weak and conflict-ridden in its early decades but, granted German protection, by no means unviable.
The big question was whether a German-Ukrainian alliance, and more broadly a German order in east-central Europe, could have endured. In general terms one has to remember that creating the military basis for empire or even hegemony is only the first stage, and usually the easier one. For empire to last, a second and often more challenging stage of political consolidation is required and this entails the creation of both institutions and of legitimacy. Napoleon learned this to his cost. So did the British when they conquered an empire in North America in 1763 only to lose most of it within twenty years. Even after winning the First World War the British faced problems in consolidating their existing empire. In Egypt and India they succeeded, albeit at the cost of concessions. In Ireland they mostly failed. Though the post-war settlement allowed the de facto incorporation of much of the Middle East into the British Empire, here too there were great difficulties: in Iraq, London was forced to retreat towards indirect rule in the face of local revolt and limited financial resources. Attempts to control Constantinople and the Caucasus proved to be examples of imperial over-stretch and British forces had to be withdrawn.
So the question is, could Germany successfully have met the challenge of the second stage of empire-building in eastern Europe, namely political consolidation? If one looks at the German record of empire-building in 1917-18 then it is hard to be optimistic. This does not mean that German rulers were necessarily stupid or inhumane. The chief civilian administrator in Ukraine, for example, was a decent and intelligent man who tried to apply in Ukraine the lessons he had learned before the war from studying British land reform in Ireland and from his own experience in managing Japanese railways in Korea. This places the German effort in eastern Europe in its proper imperial context. But on the whole, German administration alienated local populations by its rigidity and authoritarianism, and clashes between the Germans and local nationalists were frequent. Only on the outer edges of their empire in Finland and Georgia was German intervention often both successful and popular. In Finland they were a shield for the Finnish elites and middle classes against the Russian Bolshevik neighbour and its native allies. In Georgia, a similar equation applied, but the Germans were also a welcome shield against the advance of their allies, the Turks, into the Trans-Caucasus.
But one has to remember the context in which the Germans were working. It takes some time to establish a stable basis for empire. In Iraq, for example, in 1918-22 the British had to crush a major revolt and re-think their whole political strategy before a stable imperial order acceptable both to themselves and local elites could be created. In 1917-18 Germany in eastern Europe was working under extreme pressure. All other considerations had to be subordinated to winning the war and this war must be won quickly before the German civilian population began to starve and before American reinforcements handed victory to the Allies. To a great extent German rule in the east boiled down to a vast and not very successful foraging expedition. Take out American intervention and add a peace born of stalemate on the western front and the situation would have been very different. At that point a German empire in the east would have been able to deploy not just military but also economic and cultural power to buttress its rule. In much of the region Germany was a natural economic partner and cultural model. On the other hand, reconciling some key German interests to policies essential to garner support in east-central Europe would sometimes have been very hard: as always the German agrarian lobby would have been among the most vocal and obstructive of these lobbies.
Success would have depended on the intelligence or otherwise with which the Germans went about building their empire. Most of the German civilian statesmen and the great majority of the leaders of the centre and left-of-centre political parties realised that a successful empire in the east had to be 'informal', must take local nationalisms into account, and had to operate through deals with local elites. The military leadership was cruder and both it and some of its civilian allies had far-reaching annexationist schemes. It is very hard to predict the results of the interplay between political groupings within a victorious Germany and between the German leadership and the realities it encountered on the ground in east-central Europe. Once the immediate wartime crisis was over some of the steam ought to have been taken out of the military leadership. Nevertheless, where German strategic interests or German minorities clashed with the locals - as in Latvia, Estonia and Poland - a particularly hard line was likely to prevail in Berlin.
Would a German informal empire in eastern Europe have been acceptable to the local populations? Merely to ask the question is sufficient to inspire apoplexy in local nationalists and often with good reason. For the Poles a German-dominated eastern Europe would have been a huge setback for their national cause, not least if German hegemony rested partly on backing Ukrainians in the venomous Polish- Ukrainian dispute over ownership of eastern Galicia. For the Latvians and Estonians, anxious to throw off the rule of Baltic German elites, German victory would also have been insupportable. Given population losses among Latvians due to war and emigration, a determined policy of German colonisation might actually even have succeeded in turning this small country into a German-majority land. In most of the Austrian Empire, German victory would have strengthened Austrian- Germans' power and boosted their claims that the German language must have priority in administration and education. But so long as the Habsburg monarchy survived (which it would have done in the event of victory) it would never have allowed any extreme version of German nationalism to prevail within its borders because to do so would undermine the dynasty's raison d'etre. Moreover, for some of the peoples of eastern Europe, most notably the Jews, German informal empire could have had great attractions.
When contemplating a possible German empire in eastern Europe after the First World War it is important to make comparisons not with the situation in the region today but rather with eastern Europe's fate for most of the twentieth century. The basic point was that 1918 was only a truce, not a true peace settlement. This was partly because the Allied coalition that had won the war and built the Versailles order promptly disintegrated, thereby removing the power-political foundations on which that settlement rested. Above all, this meant the retreat into isolation of the United States and Britain's refusal to sign a military alliance with France or preserve the conscript army that would have made such an alliance real. These were elementary errors that would have made the statesmen who met in Vienna in 1815 cringe. But even without this foolishness the Versailles settlement was very vulnerable. As already noted, the First World War emerged in eastern Europe and revolved around Germanic competition with Russia to dominate that region. Both the Germans and Russians ended up as losers and the Versailles settlement was made at their expense. But Russia and Germany remained potentially the most powerful countries not just in eastern and central Europe but in the continent as a whole. For that reason the Versailles order was very unlikely to survive, especially since it included the large geopolitical hole left by the disappearance of the Habsburgs.
For all these reasons a second great war in eastern Europe was always a likely outcome of 1918. That war brought terrible suffering for the region's peoples and ended in most of them falling under the rule of Stalin's Russia. Would German victory in 1918 have led to a stable east-central Europe and spared the region a second great war? One cannot know but the chances were probably better than those of the Versailles settlement. Would German rule have proved less awful than that of Stalin? Again, it is impossible to say but one should certainly refrain from making glib comparisons between Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, and never more so than where policy in eastern Europe was concerned. The Kaiserreich contained thoroughly unpleasant authoritarian, nationalist and racist elements and victory might have encouraged them. But it could hardly have warped them more completely than did the bitterness of defeat. During the First World War the Germans were responsible for some atrocities and many infringements of international law. But no belligerent was entirely innocent in this respect and German misbehaviour did not match Russian treatment of the Jews in the eastern war zone, Austrian repression of the Serbs or - at the ultimate extreme - Ottoman destruction of the Armenians. Not even remotely can German policy in the east in 1914-18 be compared to the insane and genocidal savagery of 1941-5.
How should we relate the broader international context in 1914-18 to Russia's fate and specifically to the outcome of the Russian Revolution? Clearly it was crucial and equally clearly it was highly contingent. As I wrote above, had the Russian monarchy fallen in 1906 then Germany would probably have led an international intervention that may well have helped counter-revolution to triumph in Russia, for a time at least. Instead during the First World War Germany bent all its efforts to furthering the cause of revolution in Russia. Lenin entered Russia thanks to the famous 'sealed train', which Berlin allowed to cross German-occupied Europe. Once he had arrived in Petrograd the
Germans continued to do everything they could to foster the revolution in order to undermine the Russian war effort. Lenin was extremely fortunate that his gamble at Brest-Litovsk paid off. Germany's defeat on the western front forced Berlin to abandon the treaty and allowed Bolshevik Russia to move back into Ukraine and thereby to preserve the foundations of empire, albeit in renewed and socialist form. The half-hearted intervention of the Western Allies and their unwilling armies on the margins of Russia's Civil War was a very pale reflection of what peacetime European intervention spearheaded by the German army would have entailed. In any case the war, Berlin's support and then German disintegration had allowed the Bolsheviks a crucial year in which to organise their rule and consolidate their hold on Russia's geopolitical core where most of its population, its military supplies and its communications hubs were concentrated. This was probably the single most important factor in Bolshevik victory in the Civil War. In peacetime, foreign intervention in support of domestic counterrevolution would probably have denied a revolutionary government this breathing space. Without the First World War it is possible that something like the Bolshevik-Left Socialist Revolutionary government of 1917 could have come to power but barely conceivable that it could have survived.
A very interesting question concerns relations between a victorious Germany and Russia. Inevitably, in wartime geopolitical interests conquered the ideological distaste of the Wilhelmine elites for Bolshevism. If Germany had won, however, it is a moot point whether it would have continued to tolerate Bolshevism in power in Moscow. The calculation would have been difficult. Germany would have had more than enough on its plate in recovering from the war at home and consolidating its hold on eastern Europe. The last thing it would have needed was renewed war in Russia. Berlin would also have needed to reintegrate itself into the international economy. An intelligent German government would not merely have abandoned all idea of annexations in France and Belgium but even made minor territorial concessions in Alsace to appease the French. With all eastern Europe in its grasp it could well have afforded such gestures, though in the aftermath of war it is very unlikely to have made them. But if the United States had remained neutral in the war then the resumption of trans-Atlantic and global commerce should have been rapid, with enormous consequent benefits to Germany.
In time the French and British would probably have reconciled themselves to German hegemony in the east. In reality, in the twentieth century neither Britain nor France has ever had the power or even (in the British case) the inclination to involve itself decisively in the affairs of the region. The fiasco of Western 'assistance' to the Poles in 1939 and 1944-45 emphasises this point. A consequence of a 'compromise' peace with Germany would probably have been an Anglo-French defensive alliance but Germany would have had no reason to seek to change its western borders once its hegemony in the east was secure. Why run after French coal or iron ore when you have the resources of eastern Ukraine at your disposal?
The only possible challenge to German hegemony in the east could come from Russia. If the Germans succeeded in consolidating their rule in eastern Europe and in particular if a stable pro-German regime established itself in Kiev then it would be a long time, if ever, before any Russian regime could restore their country's power to a level where it could challenge Germany. In 1918 the Germans preferred Bolshevism to the Russian counter-revolution because the latter was pro-allied and was pledged to continuing the war against Germany. After victory Germany would have had the luxury of playing both sides in Russia off against each other. A victorious Germany need have little fear of domestic revolution and could, if necessary, tolerate Bolshevism in power in Moscow. It could also threaten a Bolshevik regime that misbehaved towards Germany with German support for the Russian counter-revolution. The Germans believed that a Bolshevik regime would always be weak. That proved a mistake. But they were correct in believing that it would be far harder for France and Britain to ally with a Bolshevik Russia than with a victorious Russian counter-revolution. So probably for the foreseeable future they would have tolerated
Lenin's rule. The German order in Europe that would have emerged from victory might well have avoided a second world war and would probably have spared Europe from Hitler. But it would probably not have spared the Russians from Stalin.
Like all counterfactual arguments this conclusion is no more than informed guesswork. Counterfactual debates are to some extent just an amusing possibility to give flight to the imagination but they do also have more serious uses. Nothing is more fatal than belief that history's course was inevitable. Not only is this untrue, it is also an invitation to moral abdication and political inaction. In this chapter, I have addressed a number of counterfactuals in the international arena that might have radically changed both Russian and European history in the era of the Russian Revolution. This exercise is of special value because it illustrates the manner in which the history of Russia and that of Europe were tightly entangled. The struggle to become and remain a European great power was probably the single most important factor driving the evolution of imperial Russia. At the same time one cannot understand European or global history if one ignores imperial Russia's vital impact on both. At no time was the connection between Russia's fate and that of Europe more closely entwined than in the years 1900-1920.
THE ASSASSINATION OF STOLYPIN
September 1911 simon dixon
E
ver since pyotr arkadyevich stolypin was shot at the Kiev Municipal Theatre on 1 September 1911, his assassination has provoked debate. Among the few aspects ofthe case that remain beyond dispute is the identity of the prime minister's killer. Dmitry Bogrov, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer on the fringes of the Socialist Revolutionary movement, fired twice at Stolypin from point-blank range. But why did he do it? Was the assassination an exculpatory gesture of loyalty demanded by fellow terrorists, shocked that he had betrayed them to the police in order to repay his student gambling debts? Or was he still a double agent in the pay of shadowy forces on the right who despised Stolypin's land reforms as a sell-out to Jewish speculators? Was Bogrov on the contrary defending his own Jewish family's interests in the face of Stolypin's increasingly strident Great Russian nationalism, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggested in his fictionalised treatment of the assassination in The Red Wheel? More fundamentally still, posterity has wondered whether history could have turned out differently had Stolypin lived. Might his ambitious programme of reform have averted the revolutions of 1917? Could his celebrated 'wager on the strong' - an attempt to transform the impoverished Russian peasantry into a flourishing agrarian bourgeoisie - have laid the foundations for the stable era of peace and prosperity that so cruelly eluded the Bolsheviks?
The obvious ideological significance of such questions has helped to give them lasting contemporary relevance. In the West, Stolypin's reputation first became a political punchball during the Cold War, when it divided the minority of historians unsympathetic to the left. While a handful of so-called optimists argued that revolution had been far from inevitable in Russia, a larger number of sceptics - including some of those who advised Margaret Thatcher in advance of her meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in spring 1987 - insisted that Stolypin was a transient figure whose failure demonstrated just how impervious Russia could prove to root-and-branch reform.1 In Russia itself, it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that converted Stolypin's legacy into a prominent part of the search for a useable political past. Since 1991, he has been rehabilitated as the progenitor of the sort of patriotic, conservative consensus yearned for by many Russians in the early twenty-first century: an economically plausible way of restoring national pride without resorting to the atrocities associated with Stalin. In an opinion poll to find the greatest Russian in history - organised by the state-controlled television station Rossiya in December 2008 and answered by more than fifty million people - Stolypin came second only to the medieval warrior, Prince Alexander Nevsky. Stalin was pushed into third place; Pushkin, Peter the Great and Lenin also ran.
How did a tsarist prime minister, ignored and reviled for much of the Soviet period, suddenly come to be so widely admired? Some small part of the answer may lie in the flood of documents, biographies and monographs published by historians over the course of the last twenty-five years.2 Present-minded concerns certainly seem to lie close to the surface of many scholarly attempts to portray Stolypin as a consensual conservative moderate rather than the Bonapartist counter-revolutionary denounced by Lenin or the precursor of Mussolini admired by self-styled Russian Fascists in the 1920s. Still, even the herculean efforts of the academic Stolypin industry can hardly have generated the level of popular adulation registered by the 2008 opinion poll, in which Stolypin garnered 523,766 votes. Neither can such widespread acclaim be attributed to debates in the public sphere, extensive as they have been, for these too have been targeted primarily at the intelligentsia. Not all contemporary Russian commentators have looked favourably on Stolypin's legacy. Indeed, Sergei Kara-Murza, an idiosyncratic critic of progress in both its Marxist and liberal capitalist guises, believes that his reforms had a fatally destabilising effect. First published in 2002, Kara-Murza's Stolypin: Father of the Russian Revolution was re-issued at the centenary of the assassination under a still more explicit title: Stolypin's Mistake: The Prime Minister who Overturned Russia.3 His, however, is a minority view. A far greater weight of opinion has come down in favour of Stolypin's prophetic abilities in the manner of a monk at the Trinity St Sergius Monastery at Sergiev Posad whose brief popular biography, published in 2013, presents Stol- ypin as the victim of 'dark forces' who 'hated' him: 'orphaned' by his assassination, Russia fell 'into the hands of the destroyers' - 'only he knew what had to be done for the prosperity of Russia'.4
Like the occasional note of dissent, much of this popular support can be traced to the consistent self-identification with Stolypin of another self-styled man of destiny: Vladimir Putin. Keen to burnish his own image as a conservative moderniser, and no less anxious to underplay Stolypin's authoritarian instincts, Mr Putin reportedly keeps a picture of the former prime minister on his office wall (Angela Merkel apparently prefers Catherine the Great) and has repeatedly underlined his respect for Stolypin's patriotism, stamina and sense of responsibility. Already in 2000, during his first term as president of the Russian Federation, Putin drew explicit parallels between his own aspirations towards stable economic development and Stolypin's attempts to reconcile civil liberties and political democratisation with the virtues of a strong national state. This was no passing fancy. When plans were afoot to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Stolypin's birth in 2012, Putin exhorted every member of his government to donate at least a month's salary in support of a memorial to be placed outside the Russian Parliament building. So it is not merely an intellectual parlour game to wonder what might have transpired had Stolypin's reforms succeeded, and to consider their chances of success had he survived Dmitry Bogrov's attempt on his life.
Stolypin travelled to Kiev at the end of August 1911 to attend the inauguration of a statue to Alexander II (r. 1855-81) by his grandson, Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917). Superficially, such a ceremony might seem unremarkable, and indeed at one level it was merely the latest in a series of commemorations held in the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the emancipation of Russia's serfs on 19 February. At a deeper level, however, it was no easy matter for Nicholas II to celebrate the legacy of the 'tsar-liberator', whose vision of national greatness varied sharply from his own. In an attempt to recover from the humiliation inflicted on the Romanov dynasty by the Crimean War, Alexander II had taken Russia down the path of Western-inspired reform based on Western- style institutions such as trial by jury. But hopes for the peaceful growth ofcivic nationalism in Russia were blown to smithereens along with the tsar himself, when terrorists, disillusioned by the slow pace of change, assassinated him on 1 March 1881. Nicholas II stubbornly maintained a very different set of values incorporated in the Muscovite revival begun by his father, Alexander III (r. 1881-1894). After 1881, Russia's last two tsars not surprisingly insisted on the maintenance of order, a virtue instilled into each of them by their tutor, K. P. Pobedonostsev. But Nicholas went further than Alexander III by insisting on the restoration of pure autocracy, sanctioned directly by God and underpinned by a vision of Russian history that reached back beyond the European- ised empire launched by Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) to venerate the Muscovite tsardom that had gone before. Visual representations highlighted the contrast. At the costume ball to celebrate the bicentenary of St Petersburg in 1903, Nicholas II dressed not as the new capital's irreverent westernising founder, but as his pious Muscovite father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Indeed, had he not been deterred by the expense, Nicholas would have abandoned Western-style uniforms altogether and clothed his whole court permanently in Muscovite costume.5
The biggest political question facing the Russian old regime at the beginning of the twentieth century was whether these two rival world views could be reconciled. Stolypin's appointment as minister of internal affairs in April 1906, and his assumption of the additional office of prime minister in July, offered a glimmer of hope to those who believed that they might be. No man was more closely associated with the restoration of order than Stolypin, who had impressed the tsar since 1903 as governor of the notoriously turbulent province of Saratov. However, although his unflinching resort to force in the face of revolutionary unrest had given his name to the hangman's noose, the progenitor of 'Stolypin's necktie' was no ordinary reactionary. In fact, he was not a reactionary at all. Close to his fortieth birthday in 1902, he had become the empire's youngest provincial governor in Grodno on the strength of his innovative solutions to some of Russia's most intransigent social and economic problems. Born in the year after the serfs were freed, he had studied natural sciences at the University of St Petersburg - an unusual choice for a young nobleman - and eighteen months after starting work at the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1885 had volunteered for the Ministry of Agriculture's Department of Statistics, where he developed his interest in private farming. In 1889, at the point when he might have launched a conventional bureaucratic career in the capital, he opted instead to return to his native Kovno province (present-day Kaunas in Lithuania), where he learned to manage his own expanding estates, to resolve complex land disputes as chairman of the local peace arbitrators, and to consider wider political questions first as district marshal of the nobility and ultimately as provincial marshal. Presiding at a banquet to commemorate the emancipation in February 1911, Stolypin could plausibly claim that he had been dealing with the institutions of peasant government for most of his conscious life. Here, it seemed, was exactly the sort of dynamic agrarian technocrat dreamed of by those who yearned for a Russian Bismarck.6
There were, nevertheless, significant underlying differences between the tsar and his new prime minister that helped to destabilise their relationship.7 Whereas Nicholas II believed in the divinely consecrated union of tsar and people, Stolypin wanted to make the impersonal state the focus of national unity. This ambition led him to seek to reconcile the two westernised social groups that the tsar distrusted most: the bureaucracy and 'educated society' (obshchestvennost) - publicly engaged professionals who had benefited from the civic freedoms granted by Alexander II and who now saw an unprecedented opportunity for political influence in the Duma, the elective chamber created in response to the revolution of 1905.8 In the cause of national unity, Stolypin also strove to dissolve the boundaries between the congeries of ethnic groups that made up the multinational Russian Empire and between the social estates (sosloviia) into which most of the empire's subjects had been legally ascribed at birth.
Of these estates, Stolypin regarded the immiserated peasantry as the Russian nation's weakest link. He had been convinced by his experiences in Saratov, where the peasantry was especially poor and the link between poverty and insurrection inescapable, that if the common people were ever to form a reliable bedrock for the tsarist regime, then they must be enriched by the spread of private property and must be granted the political freedom denied to them by the terms of the emancipation of 1861. This had isolated peasants from most of the new civic institutions that governed the rest of Russian society by keeping them tied to the commune. The cornerstone of Stolypin's programme as prime minister was therefore the decision to permit heads of peasant households to leave the commune at any time under the terms of the agrarian reform of 9 November 1906. In the following year, local Land Settlement Commissions were created to make it easier for peasants to consolidate into private farms their share of the narrow strips of land hitherto widely distributed across their villages under communal cultivation. There was also a significant political dimension to this fundamental economic change. In addition to offering favourable terms in the form of easier credit from the Peasant Land Bank, Stolypin repeatedly justified his policies by stressing that peasant prosperity was inseparable from enlightenment and freedom. So his agrarian reform was flanked by legislation to allow peasants to escape the supervisory institutions he knew so well from Kovno and Grodno, and to gain unprecedented legal independence and freedom of movement.
These provisions alone were sufficient to disconcert Nicholas II, and tensions between him and Stolypin were clearly apparent by the time that the imperial suite travelled to Kiev. For Nicholas, such provincial visits served to signal his detachment from the alien values he associated with cosmopolitan St Petersburg and to emphasise his spiritual closeness to the common people. Kiev was particularly receptive territory for such a strategy because an exceptionally well-organised nationalist movement had developed there, divided though not debilitated by splits between the elite Kiev Club of Russian Nationalists and the populist Union of Russian People (URP), two groups who competed in their efforts to host the tsar.9 For Stolypin, by contrast, the highlight of the visit was a gathering of deputies from the empire's six western provinces, where, expressly against the wishes of the tsar and the State Council, he had insisted in spring 1911 on the establishment of zemstvos - the elective local authorities created by Alexander II in 1864, but hitherto kept out of the western borderlands in case they became dominated by Polish landowners.
Stolypin had no truck with Polish influence. Indeed, his proposed electoral law incorporated a complex system of ethnic voting blocs designed to emasculate it. Had he been certain of finding a way to ensure Russian dominance there, the zemstvos would also have been extended to three more provinces in his native north-west: Vitebsk, Grodno and Kovno. Nevertheless, his scheme remained suspect in the eyes of Russian noble landowners because the prime minister's way of counteracting the Polish elite was to enfranchise large numbers of Russian peasants - an unprecedentedly democratic scheme that Stolypin evidently intended as a Trojan horse for the further democra- tisation of local government elsewhere in the empire.
Tensions within the elite could to some extent be masked in Kiev because the pattern ofsuch Russian royal visits, established by Peter the Great and embellished over the course of the following two centuries, prescribed all manner of diverting pomp and circumstance ranging from military manoeuvres to religious ritual. Of all these ceremonial occasions, grand opera was the one on which the imperial party could most readily agree: it bored them rigid. So it was more in the cause of social duty than of artistic anticipation that they trooped into the Kiev Municipal Theatre on the evening of 1 September for a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tale of Tsar Saltan.
Stolypin sat in the front row of the stalls, not far from Baron Fred- eriks, the minister of the court, and General Sukhomlinov, the minister of war. Stretching their legs at the intervals, they stood with their backs to the orchestra, relaxing with their neighbours. Suddenly, in the second interval, a young man whose evening dress stood out against the overwhelmingly uniformed audience walked coolly down the aisle, drew a revolver from his programme and fired twice at the prime minister. One bullet caught his right hand; the other hit him just below the right ribs (though fully aware of being a terrorist target - his daughter had been crippled by the bomb that destroyed their house in August 1906 - he had characteristically refused to wear a bullet-proof vest). Turning to Nicholas II and his daughters, who had returned to their box having heard the shots from a neighbouring reception room, Stolypin made the sign of the cross (some thought he was blessing the tsar) and collapsed into his seat. Tall, strong and resilient, he initially seemed likely to survive: doctors saw no reason to remove the bullet and declared his condition satisfactory; his wife came to visit him at the hospital; so did the minister offinance, Vladimir Kokovtsov, with whom he talked animatedly about government business. But by nightfall on 3 September, an infection had set in and Stolypin's condition deteriorated. In between bouts of hallucination and unconsciousness, the only word heard clearly from his lips was 'Finland' - the borderland grand duchy whose political autonomy he had done most to undermine in the cause of imperial integration. By the evening of 5 September, Stolypin was dead.
First published in a heavily redacted selection as early as 1914, the documents relating to his assassination have recently appeared in a volume covering more than 700 closely printed pages.10 Even so, much of the mystery surrounding the event remains unresolved. Since his guilt was obvious, Bogrov was rapidly tried and hanged. But what was his motive? Solzhenitsyn's insistence on the significance of his Jewish roots is easily dismissed: the Bogrovs were a wealthy Kievan family, long since assimilated into the Russian elite. Rumours of a conspiracy on the right are harder to disprove because Stolypin certainly had enemies in the tsarist regime and one of them, his own deputy as minister of internal affairs, was in charge of security in Kiev. Pyotr Kurlov had been responsible for imperial security since 1909, when the tsar made his first official journey after the 1905 revolution in order to celebrate the bicentenary of Peter the Great's victory over the Swedes at Poltava. As a result, Kiev's governor general, who might traditionally have expected promotion or decoration after a successful imperial visit, was mortified to discover that the sole task entrusted to him was the purchase of a car for out-of-town trips - a commission made all the more humiliating when the allocated budget of 8,000 roubles turned out to be insufficient and he had to draw on emergency local funds. Yet although Kurlov persistently intrigued against Stolypin at court, the balance ofprobabilities points not to a conspiracy but to stunning incompetence on the part of the secret police. Most culpable of all was Colonel N. N. Kulyabko, the head of the Kiev Okhrana (secret police) to whom Bogrov had personally reported as an agent provocateur. The credulous Kulyabko granted Bogrov a ticket for the theatre having believed his promise to identify two (fictional) fellow terrorists, who were themselves allegedly plotting to kill Stolypin. Though subsequent investigations left no doubt of the lapses of Kurlov and Kulyabko, they almost certainly escaped punishment not because the tsar sympathised with their schemes against the prime minister, even if he did, but because it was too embarrassing for Nicholas to publicise their failings.11
It is not difficult to see the attractions of Stolypin's 'wager on the strong' for Russian conservatives at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The formation of a prosperous agrarian bourgeoisie in Russia might not have sufficed to dissolve all the underlying tensions between rich and poor peasants a hundred years ago, and rural dwellers would doubtless still have been tempted to hoard grain rather than release it for consumption in the towns. Nevertheless, allowing for the avoidance of extreme shortages and the development of more sophisticated means of distribution in years when the harvest was poor, there would have been no need for the vicious war of peasant against peasant that ravaged the Russian provinces between 1918 and 1920, no need for Stalin's destructive collectivisation of agriculture at the end of the 1920s, and no need for extravagant (and ultimately wasteful) fantasies such as Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign thirty years later. More fundamentally still, there would have been no need for either Stalin or Khrushchev, because a thriving class of yeoman farmers of the sort envisaged by Stolypin might conceivably have been reconciled to the monarchy by being granted a meaningful stake in Russia's government and administration. Had such conservative allegiances solidified consistently over the longer term, it would have been much more obvious in both world wars what the Russian populace were fighting for, rather than merely what they were fighting against. Whether a predominantly agrarian regime could have developed the military resources that stemmed from Stalin's forced industrialisation in the 1930s is naturally a moot point. But provided that its borderlands had been secured by the kind of integrationist policies Stolypin urged in Finland and elsewhere, a politically and economically stable Russian Empire might in any case have presented a much less inviting target to any potential invader than the multinational Soviet Union, where many inhabitants of the western regions were by no means wholly hostile to the Germans in 1941. In short, it is possible to imagine that the realisation of Stolypin's dream could have led to the emergence of a strong, stable, more or less autarkic regime, daunting to its international rivals, and securely entrenched in the huge landmass stretching from the Far East to the German borderlands - a phenomenon not so different in outline from the nirvana envisaged by Eurasian philosophers in the 1920s and by neo-Eurasians in the 1990s, but stripped of their overt hostility to European civilisation.
The problem with such a vision is that social and economic change on the scale envisaged by Stolypin would have taken generations to come to fruition wherever it had been planned, and in Russia the conditions were singularly unpropitious. In a newspaper interview in 1909, Stolypin himself suggested that twenty years of peace would be needed if his reforms were to succeed. Considering the underdeveloped state of Russia's economy and society, that sounds like an underestimate: when Stolypin came into office in 1906, the empire was still reeling from both internal revolution and international humiliation. Thanks to the severity of the climate, no one has ever found it easy to make money out of Russian agriculture. In the imperial period, profits were made largely by exporting grain even in time of famine - not a popular policy among Russian peasants - or by converting grain to vodka, which is less expensive to transport by unit weight. Even twenty years of consistent development was a Utopian prospect in a state whose history has notoriously been characterised by extreme political 'zigzags' of the sort that followed Alexander II's assassination. Although he was not yet fifty at the time of his death, Stolypin can hardly have expected to remain in office for much longer. Already five years long by 1911, his tenure as the tsar's chief minister exceeded that of many of his predecessors. And there was no guarantee that any of his successors would have been sufficiently strong or intelligent to sustain his direction of reform.
For all these reasons, the further we move forward from 1911, the more hazardous predictions become. Even in the short term, they are necessarily hedged about with an alarming range of 'ifs' and 'buts'. Pointing to Stolypin's consistent emphasis on Russia's need for peace, his American biographer, Abraham Ascher, speculates reasonably enough that he would have tried to prevent Russia from going to war in July 1914.12 Whether war would thereby have been aborted is another matter. Growing international rivalries pointed increasingly towards a major European conflict, and since all the great powers knew from their intelligence gatherers that the military reforms spearheaded by Sukhomlinov after the Russo-Japanese War were due to be completed by 1917, Russia's rivals had every incentive to pounce before then. Whenever war broke out, Russia would still have faced the geopolitical difficulties it had experienced in all its armed conflicts with the West since the seventeenth century, when the sheer distances involved in mobilising its troops had repeatedly caused the tsar's armies to start slowly and unsuccessfully. Here, one might think, is a classic case where the power of any single 'great man' to influence events was almost certain to be limited.
As it happens, however, there is no need to speculate, because there is ample evidence to show that Stolypin's political capital had already been exhausted long before his assassination. The crucial question is therefore not what might have happened between 1911 and 1914, but what did happen between 1906 and 1911.
In the first place, peasants themselves never showed much enthusiasm for Stolypin's reforms.13 Except to the extent that land consolidation on the part of even a small number of households sometimes generated a domino effect for a larger range of neighbours, the decision to privatise was voluntary. Only in the Baltic provinces, where German influence ran deep, and in neighbouring parts of Stolypin's north-western stamping ground, did significant numbers of households opt to establish the khutora that he envisaged as his ideal: small private farmsteads, no more than three times as long as they were wide, owned by a single head of household, and comprising a single parcel of land surrounding the farm buildings. There was wider support for the otruba - a compromise between communal and private tenure in which the farmhouse was separated from its consolidated landholding. But none of these choices necessarily signalled that the peasantry shared Stolypin's commitment either to individual landownership or to the wider responsibilities and opportunities that came with it. Resourceful as ever, many peasants simply exploited his legislation as a means of settling old scores either with their own relatives or with members of rival families. So, although Stolypin's admirers can point to the fact that during the first decade of his agricultural reform some two and a half million peasant households (rather more than a fifth of the total in 1916) received title deeds to land that they had formerly held communally, critics retort that the rate of privatisation had already slowed significantly even before the reform retrospectively passed the Duma in summer 1910. Furthermore, over half the land sold through the agency of the Peasant Land Bank was bought not by individual heads of household but by village communes and cooperatives. In 1916, 61 per cent of all households still held their land in communal tenure and, given a choice in 1917, over 95 per cent of peasants opted to return to it - clear testimony to the resilience of the small-scale collectivist ideal in Russian peasant culture.
A second level of problems arose in the arena of national politics when Stolypin attempted to legislate for the wider consequences of his agrarian reforms. There was no hope of collaboration between government and parliament so long as the first two Dumas remained dominated by two parties on the centre-left. One was the liberal Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), who had been a thorn in Stolypin's side in Saratov province, where they formed an unusually strong alliance with the radical intelligentsia. The other was the Trudoviks (Labourers), whose electoral success exposed the hollowness of the tsar's expectations of a loyalist peasantry. Initially, therefore, Stolypin relied largely on the repressive methods that had served him well in Saratov.
The prospects of more peaceful reform revived only when he engineered a new franchise via the electoral law of 7 June 1907. The third Duma, which met for the first time on 1 November, was dominated by 154 conservative Octobrists (a threefold increase at 35 per cent of the total) and 147 rightists of various degrees of extremism. Kadet representation was halved and Trudovik numbers plummeted to a tenth of their former strength.14 Yet even from this superficially more pliable constellation of forces, generated almost entirely by his own gerrymandering, Stolypin was unable to secure a working majority. That was partly because the Octobrists and rightists were less politically cohesive than their numbers imply, but mainly because each of the prime minister's projected reforms offended a variety of powerful interest groups who had more to lose than they had to gain from a state governed by the rule of law and from the creation of a new class of peasant smallholders.
Religious reform was a striking case in point. Toleration for the avowedly conservative Old Believers had been under discussion since the late 1850s and was in theory confirmed in the toleration edict of 17 April 1905: a symbolic date, Easter Sunday. For the first time in Russian history, this made confessional allegiance a matter of individual conscience. However, Stolypin's efforts to confirm the concession once the threat of revolution had abated were virulently opposed by Orthodox bishops in the State Council. Other measures proved equally controversial, not so much because they were new - like the religious reforms, most of them had been under discussion for some years - but because Stolypin's drive and determination threatened to shape them into unprecedentedly subversive constellations. Nobles derailed his proposed changes to local government, fearing that their own influence would be squeezed between that of a growing peasant democracy and enhanced powers for the provincial governor. By preventing peasant democratisation, the nobility effectively slowed down the whole process of land reform. The prospect of new local courts with jurisdiction over the whole population, including the peasantry, was equally unpalatable to nobles alarmed by the prospect of judges drawn from the liberal intelligentsia: in the end, the State Council approved a purely peasant court, with peasant judges, to deal with the peasantry, ensuring that they remained as isolated as ever from mainstream institutions of government and justice. Any attempt to conciliate the landowners nevertheless risked opposition from industrialists who were themselves determined to frustrate Stolypin's attempts to introduce accident and sickness insurance for factory workers: the legislation that finally emerged on this subject was not only delayed (in the case of sickness insurance until after the prime minister's assassination), but a good deal more expensive for the consumer than he had intended.15
To navigate a consistent course between such incompatible lobbies required greater powers of persuasion and flexibility than Stolypin could readily muster. Though conscious of the need to mobilise public opinion behind his reforms, he was fundamentally a bureaucrat rather than a politician. Using subsidies granted by Stolypin's own government, extremists on the right proved to be masters ofthe sensationalist tabloid journalism that did much to undermine him. More conventional political parties, profiting from the relaxation of censorship after 1905, could each count on the support of sophisticated broadsheet newspapers. Stolypin, by contrast, conceived the press largely as an organ of government information and never contemplated the creation of a party of his own. That was only one of the many ways in which he differed from Mussolini: he was the opposite of a charismatic leader. His prose was disfigured by the strangulated constructions of Russian 'officialese'. Neither was he a good speaker: his voice was too metallic and his body language awkward. After hearing Stolypin address the Duma, one of Russia's most influential and idiosyncratic columnists, Vasily Rozanov, commented that it was like watching 'a catfish swim through jam'.16
Temperamentally ill-equipped to cope with the onset of mass politics, Stolypin was particularly bemused by extra-parliamentary agitation. The charismatic young monk, Iliodor (Trufanov), danced rings around him, denouncing the prime minister as Pontius Pilate at the Fourth Monarchist Congress in 1907 and in 1911 leading a populist crusade on the Volga that dominated the national headlines between the anniversary ofthe emancipation and Stolypin's assassination. When Iliodor began a widely publicised hunger strike in Tsaritsyn, surrounded by thousands of female admirers, Stolypin responded by besieging his monastery with troops.17 The same authoritarian instincts were still more fatal to his dealings with the Duma and the State Council. Even his two most significant measures - the agrarian reform of 9 November 1906 and the Western Zemstvo legislation of 1911 - had to be pushed through under Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws promulgated on 23 April 1906, a provision intended to be used only in extremis. The dissolution of the second Duma in May 1907 and the promulgation of the electoral law of 7 June were equally flagrant violations of the principle that all new laws must be subject to prior approval by parliament.
In the eyes of even the most respectful of elite liberals, Stolypin's repeated willingness to flout basic constitutional conventions deprived him of all authority. Count Ivan Tolstoy, the only member of Witte's cabinet who had supported full toleration for the Jews in 1905, 'completely refused' to recognise Stolypin as 'a "talented" statesman'. 'For me,' he wrote shortly after the prime minister's assassination, 'he always was, and will always remain, a favourite, i.e. a careerist, with all the shortcomings that brings.' Stolypin's energy and decisiveness therefore had to be set against 'incomparably more serious shortcomings: the absence of a critical mind, narrowness of political outlook'. Such a verdict may catch Stolypin's streak of ambition, but it surely underestimates his independence of mind and the sophistication of his grasp, unrivalled by any contemporary, of the interplay between society, economics and politics. Nevertheless, Tolstoy's hostility indicates the depth of the Kadets' resentment of the prime minister's equally unrelenting contempt for them. Tolstoy was surely not the only liberal who believed that if Stolypin's successors chose to continue his policies, which had allegedly benefited only 'spongers' and 'scoundrels', they would succeed merely in restoring the discredited 'template' of the era before 1905. Nothing could be worse than that.18
While liberals were alienated by Stolypin's increasingly desperate attempts to woo the right by supporting chauvinist nationalism, the right itself, and particularly its more radical elements such as the rabble- rousing URP, thought that he had betrayed the tsar by consorting with an illegitimate parliamentary regime. The controversial archbishop of Volhynia, Antony (Khrapovitsky) - a URP sympathiser who liked to rhyme 'constitution' with 'prostitution' - could never trust Stolypin because, for all his many conflicts with the Duma, he persisted in regarding it as an integral part of the Russian legislative process. Doubts on the right set in early. The St Petersburg salon hostess Alexandra Bog- danovich was convinced of Stolypin's duplicity as soon as he became a minister. 'Apparently,' she noted on 29 April 1906, 'Stolypin is both on our side and on yours; in the morning, he is liberal, and in the evening - the opposite.'19 Over the next five years, a galaxy of disgruntled rightist leaders trooped through her salon to denounce Stolypin as 'two-faced'. Even the veteran general Alexander Kireev, who had more respect for him than most, rapidly lost confidence. At their first meeting in May 1906, the newly appointed minister of internal affairs 'made a fine impression' - 'sober-minded, favourably disposed, understands the state of affairs ... Our opinions are very close.'20 Six months later, Stolypin still struck Kireev as 'a real gentleman. (And that is important!)' But there was no longer a meeting of minds. The following exchange, recorded in the general's diary shortly before the promulgation of the agricultural reform, reveals a chasm that was to separate the prime minister from many of his potential supporters on the right, obsessed as they were by the spectre ofJewish speculators:
S[tolypin]: Do you rebuke me for the rights given to the schismatics and Old Believers?
Me [Kireev]: No, not at all. I rebuke you for the destruction of communal agriculture.
S: It is impossible not to abolish it! I have seen it, I know - and I know, too, the difference between it and landholding by khutor. Russia will immediately become richer.
Me: You have forgotten that it is not only a question of finances,
but of politics (you are creating a mass of agricultural proletarians).
All the peasants' land will be bought up by Jews.
S: So long as I am in post, that will not happen. The pale of
settlement will not be abolished.
Me: Are you eternal, then?21
Stolypin was not eternal. Indeed, as Alexander Guchkov remarked, his political death long preceded his assassination. As the scion of a prominent Old Believer dynasty, the Octobrist leader had good reason to admire Stolypin's promotion of civil rights for religious dissenters. Guchkov became the prime minister's closest parliamentary ally, at least until the crisis over the Western Zemstvos in March 1911 when the Octobrists finally lost confidence in him and he came to rely almost entirely on the Nationalist Party. Already in 1909, Stolypin's growing alignment with the Nationalists, a group committed to the protection of Russian interests in the imperial borderlands, had signalled a shift away from his earlier emphasis on economic and political reform. Neither the Octobrists nor the Nationalists offered a sufficiently stable foundation on which to build the wider consensus required for fundamental change. Virulent personal animosities made it more difficult still. As a provincial 'outsider', Stolypin had always aroused resentment and suspicion in St Petersburg. Pyotr Durnovo, his predecessor as minister of internal affairs, hated him from the start; Witte - brilliant, arrogant and permanently embittered by the circumstances of his resignation as prime minister in 1906 - pursued a relentless vendetta against his successor that reached its zenith in 1911 during the State Council debacle over the Western Zemstvos. Characteristic of the increasingly fetid atmosphere of Russian high politics, enmities such as these served primarily to unsettle Stolypin's relationship with the man who mattered more than any other: the tsar.
It was Nicholas II who did most to undermine his own prime minister. While Stolypin's reforms might have strengthened the Russian monarchy, the tsar rightly saw them as a threat to his own autocratic status - a status that he was determined, against all odds, to preserve. Ministers could stomach the idea of autocracy if it meant only that the tsar was divinely sanctioned. But for Nicholas it signalled nothing less than his own undivided sovereignty. So, while educated society greeted the October Manifesto as the dawn of a new constitutional era, the tsar himself regarded it as a personal (and far from inalienable) grant to his people. By the same token, he saw the Duma promised in the Manifesto as an extension of his own autocratic will. Consistently mistrustful of strong ministers, Nicholas ensured that neither Witte nor Stolypin ever became a Russian Bismarck. Instead, the tsar preferred to rely on informal advice from a variety of shadowy figures at court - above all from the empress, who shared his political instincts and was capable of articulating them in a way that he could not, and through her from Rasputin, the antithesis of a westernised official and the incarnation of the idealised Russian peasant who haunted her husband's mind. It was the tsar - egged on by Rasputin and the URP, and more subtly influenced by Pyotr Kurlov - who ensured that the insubordinate monk Iliodor repeatedly escaped censure, humiliating Stolypin in the process. Guchkov believed that by the time of the visit to Kiev in August 1911, Nicholas's support for the fanatical Iliodor had driven Stolypin to contemplate resignation.
All of which helps to explain why few tears were shed for Stolypin even in the immediate aftermath of his death, and why his name rarely passed the lips of his immediate successors. The new premier, Kok- ovtsov, told the council of ministers that it was their 'moral duty' to 'preserve, continue, and embody the elevated principles' with which Stolypin's 'whole work had been imbued'. But by this he meant no more than a belief in 'the good of Russia and a strong faith in her power and her great future'.22 There was no commitment to reform and Kokovtsov was in no position to achieve it, being far from the dominant prime minister that Stolypin had once been.
Few incidents in Russian history have attracted as much attention from counterfactualists as Stolypin's assassination. Certainly no event has contributed more to the re-evaluation of Russia's imperial past in the early twenty-first century. And yet, paradoxically enough, this seems to be a case where the level of attention has been inversely proportionate to the plausibility of the results. There are many points in Russia's past at which history might have turned in a different direction. Stolypin's assassination is not one of them.
GRIGORY RASPUTIN AND THE OUTBREAK OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
June 1914 douglas smith
H
e mistook her for a beggar when she first approached.
It was early on the afternoon of 29 June 1914. Grigory Rasputin, recently returned from the capital to his village of Pokrovskoe in western Siberia, had just finished lunch with his family and was on his way to send a telegram. He had opened the gate and was stepping out into the road when there she was at his side. As Rasputin reached in his pocket for his coin purse, the woman drew a long dagger from under her garment and thrust it into Rasputin's belly. He buckled over in pain, moaning, 'I'm hurt! She stabbed me!' and then set off running down the street trying to escape. After about twenty paces he turned to look back. She was dressed all in black with a white kerchief over her face covering everything but her eyes. In her right hand she held the bloody dagger aloft. And she was chasing after him. Rasputin kept running in the direction of the village church, then he stopped and picked up a large stick from the road. As she came near he raised the stick and brought it down hard over her head, knocking her to the ground. The villagers came out at the commotion, grabbed the woman, and dragged her back up the road to the Pokrovskoe district administration building.1
Rasputin was helped back to his home and laid down on a bench. His family was in hysterics. A local medical orderly was fetched, and he bandaged the wound to stop the bleeding. Meanwhile, Alexander Vladimirov, the senior doctor in Tyumen, the closest large city some fifty-two miles away, was summoned by telegram, and he immediately set out for Pokrovskoe. Rasputin drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point he called for a priest. It seemed to those gathered around Rasputin that there was little hope he would survive.
Vladimirov and his assistant arrived in the early hours of 30 June. After a brief examination, he decided that they would have to operate immediately for there was no chance of getting Rasputin back to Tyumen alive. Rasputin was put under with chloroform, and the doctor made a three-and-a-half-inch incision between the wound and the navel. Sections of Rasputin's small intestine had been sliced and had to be sutured. The wound was extremely serious; the threat of infection was great. It would be some time before they could be certain that Rasputin was out of danger.2
Her name was Khionya Guseva. She was thirty-three years old, single, and a resident of the city of Tsaritsyn (Volgograd), where she worked as a seamstress. The white kerchief she wore served to hide a grotesque deformity: Guseva was lacking a nose. She was questioned for two days. From the start she confessed to her crime, saying that Rasputin was 'a false prophet, slanderer, a rapist and a molester of young maidens'. It soon became known that she was a follower of the radical right-wing priest Iliodor, once one of Rasputin's most prominent supporters, now among his greatest foes. Guseva claimed she had acted alone and that the attempt to kill Rasputin had been entirely her own, although it was clear to the police, and to Rasputin, that Iliodor had played some role in the crime. Before they could track him down, however, Iliodor, disguised as a woman, fled his home and escaped abroad. As for Guseva, after a year-long investigation she was found irresponsible for her actions due to insanity and placed in the Tomsk
Regional Clinic for the Insane, where she would remain until March 1917 when she was released by the Provisional Government, her attack interpreted by Russia's new rulers as an act of patriotic heroism.3
Almost immediately after the attack Rasputin's daughter Matryona sent a telegram to Nicholas and Alexandra describing what had happened and how her father had miraculously survived.4 The royal family was sailing in the Finnish skerries on The Standard when they got the news. Alexandra cabled back: 'Deeply disturbed. We grieve with you and are praying with all our hearts.'5
The attack was a terrible blow to the ruling family who had drawn close to Rasputin after he first appeared at court in November 1905. Born in Pokrovskoe in January 1869 into a simple peasant family, Rasputin by 1914 was the second most famous (if not infamous) man in Russia after the tsar. His early years are largely unknown. After what appears to have been a rather rowdy youth, sometime in the 1890s Rasputin had a religious awakening. He left his wife to join the ranks of Russia's holy pilgrims (stranniki) spending many months away from home wandering across the vast country from monastery to monastery in search of enlightenment. With time, word of a Siberian holy man of profound Christian spirituality and with a mysterious gift for healing and prophecy reached St Petersburg. Rasputin came to the attention of clerics at the capital's Theological Academy and then made the acquaintance of the so-called Black Princesses, the sisters Militsa and Anastasia, daughters of the king of Montenegro, who introduced Rasputin to Nicholas and Alexandra.
The couple, and particularly Alexandra, had long been interested in mystics and popular holy men, an interest shared by many in the Petersburg elite, and over time they came to see Rasputin as one of their few true friends, someone who could be counted on to speak honestly about all matters, could convey to them the transformative beauty of Orthodoxy, and could ease the suffering ofAlexis, the haemophiliac tsarevich, through the power of his prayers. As the years passed, Alexandra also came to believe that Rasputin possessed unmatched insight into practically all matters, be it faith, politics and even warfare.
Yet for the majority of Russians, Rasputin was an intensely controversial figure. Although almost no one knew the truth of his relationship with the royal family, still everyone had an opinion. To most, Rasputin was a conniving fake, a bogus holy man, a dangerous sectarian and vul- turine womaniser craftily using his influence at court to enrich himself and destroy his enemies. In a word, he was an unforgivable stain on the Romanov throne.6
Guseva's attempt on the life of Rasputin was international news. The story was followed by papers across Europe and Britain; the New York Times carried the story on its front page.7 In Russia, the attack filled the papers for weeks and, for a time, even eclipsed the story upon which all of Europe was focused, namely the assassination on 28 June of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip.
The closeness of the attacks on Rasputin and the archduke has created a good deal of regrettable confusion and outright mendacity among historians and biographers. At first glance it does seem odd that both men were attacked only a day apart - 28 and 29 June. But any chronological (or other) connection is a mirage, for the archduke was murdered on 28 June of the Gregorian (New Style) calendar, then used in the West, which was a full thirteen days ahead of the Russian (Old Style) Julian calendar. Thus, Franz Ferdinand died on 15 June in Russia, exactly two weeks before Guseva's attack on Rasputin.
But this hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists from seeing some larger international plot. To contemporary Russian nationalist historians the attacks were part of a conspiracy by international 'Jew-Masonry' to kill the only two men who could have prevented war, the goal being to push the world into a war that would destroy the Christian empires of Europe and Russia and ignite world revolution. (Others add a third figure: the French socialist and leading anti-militarist Jean Jaures, assassinated in Paris at the Cafe du Croissant on 31 July [New Style].8) Indeed, some of the more extreme proponents of this notion go so far as to claim (against all reason and facts) that the two attempts on the men's lives happened not only on the same day but at the same hour. In his 1964 biography of Rasputin, Colin Wilson, claiming to be the first person to notice the suspicious timing of the attacks, wrote: 'Ferdinand's death made war probable; Rasputin's injury made it certain, for he was the only man in Russia capable of averting it.'9
In fact, Rasputin was still in Petersburg at the time of Franz Ferdinand's assassination. Asked his thoughts about it by a reporter for the Stock Exchange News, he said:
Well, brothers, what can Grigory Efimovich say? He's dead. Cry and shout as much as you want, it won't bring him back. Do what you will - the result will always be the same. It's fate. But our English guests in Petersburg can't help but be glad. It's good [for them]. My peasant mind tells me it's a big event - the beginning of friendship between the Russian and the English people. It's a union, my dear, of England with Russia, and if we find friendship with France as well, that's no trifle but a powerful force, really good.10
Rasputin, however, did have his worries. He told an Italian journalist: 'Yes, they say there will be war, and they are getting ready for it. May God grant that there will be no war. This troubles me.'11 On 1 July, the newspaper Day published an article by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, an expert on Russian sects as well as a Bolshevik and future secretary of Lenin, titled 'On Rasputin':
'It's easy for you to talk,' he once, being genuinely angry, scolded a person of high position, 'if you're killed, you'll have a funeral with music, newspapers will praise you, your widow will get a pension of thirty thousand, your children will be married to princes or counts, but look here: They must go to beg for minuscule alms, their land has been taken away, their house has been emptied, tears and woe, and if you're alive but have lost your legs, you'll limp along Nevsky on your hands or crutches and listen to every street cleaner telling you off: 'You, this and that, go to hell, get out of here! Out to the lane with you!' ... I've seen how Japanese war heroes are scared away off Nevsky. Have you? This is it, this is war! But you can't be bothered! You'll wave your handkerchief to the train taking the soldiers off to war, you'll prepare lint, you'll make five new dresses ... but you should see what terrible wailing there was in the village when the husbands and sons were taken off to war ... Remember that and even now there is sadness and a burning feeling here,' and he pressed as if he wanted to pull the heart out of his chest. 'There will be no war, no war, right?'12
Whatever his faults, Rasputin was a man of peace. He had an innate antipathy to bloodshed and his devout Christian faith taught him that war was a sin.
At times he spoke like a pacifist, as in this interview for Smoke of the Fatherland, again published before the war in 1914:
The Christians are preparing for war, preaching it, tormenting themselves and everyone else. War is a bad thing, and Christians instead of practicing humility are marching right into it. [.] In general, people shouldn't fight, shouldn't deprive each other of their lives and life's pleasures, one shouldn't violate Christ's testament and so destroy one's own soul prematurely. What will I get if I destroy you, enslave you? I would need to guard you and be afraid of you after that, and you will still be against me. That's when I use the sword. But with godly love, I will take you and will fear nothing. Let the Germans, the Turks fight each other - it's their misfortune, their blindness. They will find nothing and would sooner do each other in. But we shall act with love, peacefully, looking inside ourselves, and so shall we raise above them all.13
For this he was attacked on the pages of Responses to Life, the publication of the rabidly anti-Rasputin archpriest Vladimir Vostokov:
Gr. Rasputin, judging from his publication Smoke of the Fatherland, is the worst enemy of Christ's holy Church, the Orthodox faith, and the Russian state. We don't know what influence this traitor of Christ's teaching has on Russia's foreign policy, but during the war of liberation of the Balkan Christians against Turkey [in 1912] he did not support Christ but instead the pseudo-prophet Mohammed. [...] He preaches non-resistance to evil, advises Russian diplomacy to make concessions in every issue, being fully convinced, as a revolutionary, that the lost prestige of Russia and the refusal to perform her age-old tasks will cause the destruction and decay of our country. [...] Rasputin is not only a sectarian, a crook and a charlatan, but a revolutionary in the full sense of this word, working to ruin Russia. He does not care about Russia's glory and might, but aims to diminish its dignity and honour; he is fine with betraying our spiritual comrades and leaving them to the Turks and Swabians. He is prepared to welcome various misfortunes brought upon our fatherland through the disposition of Godly Providence because of the betrayal of our ancestor's legacy. And yet this enemy of God's ultimate truth is hailed as a saint by some of his followers.14
The mention of Rasputin's opposition to the Balkan Christians' 'war of liberation' refers to his position during the Balkan crisis of 1912, specifically the war launched by Montenegro and Russia's other client states in the region (Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece) against the Ottoman Empire in October of that year. As the armies of these 'small nations' marched on Constantinople, war hysteria swept across Russia. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Petersburg under the banner 'A Cross for Holy Sophia'. The Russian press called for war in defence of their fellow Slavs against the infidel, as did Mikhail Rodzyanko, president of the Duma, who told the tsar in March 1913, 'A war will be joyfully welcomed and it will raise the government's prestige.'15
Several people have insisted that it was indeed the counsel of Rasputin that kept Nicholas from going to war. Anna Vyrubova, his most devoted disciple after the empress, later wrote: 'I remember only one incident when Grigory Efimovich truly exercised influence on Russia's foreign policy. It was in 1912, when Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, a cousin of the Emperor, and husband of Anastasia, daughter of the king of Montenegro, tried to talk the Emperor into taking part in the Balkan war. Rasputin practically got on his knees before the Emperor and begged him not to do this, saying that Russia's enemies are waiting for nothing but Russia getting involved in this war, which will lead to inescapable misfortune for Russia.'16
Count Sergei Witte, the former prime minister, concurred, noting that Rasputin 'spoke decisive words at the time of the Balkans War. One must consider him therefore a fact oflife.'17 Witte was even quoted on the matter by the German Vossische Zeitung on 5 May (18 May New Style) 1914: 'The entire world disparages Rasputin, but did you know that Rasputin saved us from war?'18
Convinced of Rasputin's power at court, the German press was keen to divine his opinion on war in the Balkans. The Frankfurter Zeitung ran a story titled 'Russia and the Balkans', claiming that Rasputin had been heard to say that 'the Bulgarians have repaid the Russians for their love with ingratitude and hate, and so we must now think of ourselves and not take care of matters for these unworthy people'.19
Rasputin had travelled through the Balkans on his way to the Holy Land in 1911. What he saw did not please him.
'But perhaps the Slavs are not right, perhaps they are being put to some sort of trial?! Look, you don't know them,' he told the press, 'they are haughtier than the Turks and they hate us. I journeyed to Jerusalem, I've been to old Mount Athos - there's great sin there due to the Greeks and they don't live properly, not as monks should. And the Bulgarians are even worse. How they made fun of us Russians when they brought us there. They're a bitter people, their hearts are hard. The Turks, on the other hand, are more religious, more polite and peaceful. But if you look in the newspapers you'd think just the opposite. But I'm telling you the absolute truth.'20
With this Rasputin went well beyond simply announcing his opposition to pan-Slavism, daring to state at a moment of heightened xenophobia that Muslims were actually more truly religious than the Russians' Slavic brothers.
While Rasputin's position against the war is beyond doubt, the effect he had on Nicholas's decision is less clear. There is no record to suggest that Nicholas even listened to Rasputin's views at the time. Moreover, Rasputin was not alone in speaking out against getting dragged into the Balkans. Foreign minister Sergei Sazonov, having done much to embolden the Balkan nations and so make the war possible, was against involvement, and so, too, was Nicholas himself. He had told his ambassador to Sofia at the beginning of 1911 never to forget for a moment that Russia could not go to war for at least another five years. The mere thought of it was out of the question.21
Nicholas's words show that he and Rasputin approached the problem from somewhat different perspectives. For the emperor, war itself was not wrong, and Russia, so he suggests, would possibly go to war, but not until the country was fully prepared. For Rasputin, the matter was a bit more complicated. On one hand he suggested war was inherently wrong for a Christian, although his damning comments about the Bulgarians (and by extension other Slavs) implied that war might be a necessary evil, but only if fought for true friends.
A year after the outbreak of the war against Turkey, during which the allied Balkan states had ended up turning against each other, a vindicated Rasputin expressed his views publicly on the pages of the Petersburg Gazette on 13 October 1913.
What have our 'dear little brothers', about whom writers screamed so loudly that we must defend them, shown us? ... We have seen the deeds of our dear little brothers and now we understand ... Everything [...]
So there was a war in those Balkans. And all the writers began to scream in the newspapers: let there be war, let there be war! And, it seems, we, too, must then fight . And they called us all to war and stoked the fire ... And so I would ask them [...] I would ask the writers: 'Dear Sirs! Exactly why are you doing this? Is this really the right thing? One must calm the passions if there is some discord, for then there will be true war, and not stoke discord and hatred. [...]
We should do away with the fear and discord of war and not encourage discord and hostility. We Russians should avoid conflict and build a monument to peace - a real monument I say - to those who work for peace. A peaceful policy against war should be considered lofty and wise.22
In the days before Guseva's attack Vyrubova telegraphed Rasputin while en route to Pokrovskoe to keep him abreast of the opinions of Nicholas and Alexandra on the international crisis.23 After the attack Rasputin tried to follow the unfolding events from his hospital bed in Tyumen and to offer his advice to the emperor. The reporters there sought out his opinion about the ever-graver situation in the Balkans.24 According to his daughter Matryona, Rasputin was beside himself with worry during those days that Nicholas would go to war. He supposedly said as he lay recovering: 'I'm coming, I'm coming, and don't try to stop me. [...] Oh, Lord, what have they done? Mother Russia will perish!'25 Rasputin wrote to Nicholas telling him to 'stay strong' and not heed the voices calling for war. Such was his worry that his wound opened up and began to bleed again.26
On 12 July (25 July New Style), Rasputin wired to Vyrubova: 'A serious moment, there's a threat of war.'27 The next day he cabled again, urging her to tell the tsar to avoid war at any cost.28 On the following day, 14 July, he received an unsigned telegram from Peterhof most likely from Vyrubova, asking him to change his mind and support the calls for war: 'You are aware that our eternal enemy Austria is preparing to attack little Serbia. That country is almost entirely made up of peasants, utterly devoted to Russia. We shall be covered in infamy should we permit this shameless violence/reprisal. If the occasion arises, use your influence to support this just cause. Get well soon.'29
More pleading telegrams followed:
July 1914. From Peterhof to Tyumen. Rasputin.
Bad news. Terrible moments. Pray for him. No more strength to fight the others.
July 1914. From Peterhof to Tyumen. Rasputin.
The clouds threaten ever more. For our defence we must openly prepare ourselves, suffering terribly.
From Petersburg to Rasputin's secretary Lapshinskaya. Should the health of the starets allow, immediate arrival is necessary to help Papa in light of imminent events, his loving friends advise and fervently request. Kisses. Awaiting your answer.30
But Rasputin did not follow Vyrubova's advice and stuck to his position. He sent the emperor a telegram urging him not to go to war. The telegram has been lost, but Vyrubova, who claimed to have seen it, said it read: 'Let Papa not plan for war, for war will mean the end of Russia and yourselves, and you will lose to the last man.' Nicholas was reportedly furious at the telegram, resentful at Rasputin's interference in affairs of state that, as he saw it, did not concern him.31
Once it became clear that his telegram had failed, Rasputin made one last attempt to stop Nicholas. He requested pen and paper and from his hospital bed wrote a remarkable and prophetic letter:
Dear friend I'll say again a menacing cloud is over Russia, lots of sorrow and grief, it is dark and there's not a ray of hope. A sea of tears, immeasurable, and as to blood? What can I say? There are no words, indescribable horror. I know they all want war from you, evidently not realizing that this means ruin. Hard is God's punishment when he takes away reason, it's the beginning of the end. You are the Tsar, Father of the people, don't allow the madmen to triumph and
destroy themselves and the people. Yes, they'll conquer Germany, but what of Russia? If one thinks then truly never for all of time has one suffered like Russia, drowned in her own blood. Great will be the ruin, grief without end. Grigory32
Remarkably, the letter has survived. Although it may well not be true that Nicholas carried the letter on his person through the war, as has been asserted, nonetheless he most definitely placed great value on it, and for this reason took it with him into exile in August 1917 when the entire family was sent away from Tsarskoe Selo. It was while the Romanovs were being held in Tobolsk in early 1918 that Nicholas managed to secretly pass the letter on to Matryona Rasputin's husband, Boris Soloviev, then in Siberia trying to organise a plot to save the family. Later, after fleeing Russia, Matryona ended up in Vienna, where she apparently sold the letter to a Prince Nikolai Vladimirovich Orlov in 1922. It then changed hands at least two more times (including those of Nikolai Sokolov, investigator of the murder of the Romanovs in Ekaterinburg) before coming into the possession of one Robert D. Brewster, who donated it to Yale University in 1951.33
Rasputin's letter makes for one of those powerful 'What if ...?' moments. What if Nicholas had heeded Rasputin's words, what if the image Rasputin presented with these few charged words had opened the tsar's eyes to the horror and great danger facing Russia in the summer of 1914? Had Nicholas followed Rasputin's advice, the course not only of Russian history, but indeed world history would have been radically different. Had Russia stayed out of the war, it is hard to imagine there would have been a revolution or at least one so violent and catastrophic. The suffering that would have been avoided is unimaginable. And without the Russian revolutions of 1917, it is difficult to conceive of the rise of Hitler's Nazi Germany. But again, Nicholas ignored Rasputin's words, words that would have saved his reign, and his life and those ofhis family, and words that more than compensated for the harm Rasputin had caused, and would later cause, the prestige of the throne.
Later, once he was healed and back in Petersburg, Rasputin liked to say that had he been in the capital at the tsar's side he would have been able to convince him not to go to war.34 Count Witte, repeating his comments on the Balkan crisis, said nearly the same thing.35 It is impossible to know whether this was indeed the truth. It makes for a nice story, but ultimately it doesn't seem convincing, for as of 1914 Nicholas had rarely ever taken Rasputin's advice on important matters and when he did, it was restricted to religious affairs. It was not until much later, after Nicholas had taken up supreme command of the armed forces in 1915 and was away at Stavka, that he showed any willingness, and then reluctantly and rarely, to follow Rasputin's advice communicated to him via Alexandra's letters, the best example of this being the appointment of Alexander Protopopov as minister of the interior in September 1916.
It must also not be forgotten that Rasputin's was not the lone voice for peace. Former ambassador to the US Baron Roman Rosen, Prince Vladimir Meshchersky (publisher of The Citizen and a long-time friend of both Alexander III and Nicholas), and Witte, all spoke out against the war. After Rasputin, no one was as explicit with the tsar about the catastrophes certain to befall Russia should the country go to war than Pyotr Durnovo, former minister of the interior, which he laid out in a famous memorandum in February 1914.36
While Rasputin was writing to Nicholas, the press was wildly speculating on just what he was making of the international situation. The St Petersburg Courier, for example, noted on 16 July how Rasputin was 'extremely depressed' upon receiving a telegram from the capital about Austria's declaration of war against Serbia the day before.37
As it had during the Balkan crisis, the European press, too, ruminated on just what Rasputin was thinking. Axel Schmidt of the Hamburger Fremdenblatt wrote on 21 June 1914 (New Style) that the 'former apostle of peace' was now supposedly speaking the language of the pan-Slavists and calling for the unification of all Slavs and Orthodox believers under the Russian sceptre. If this were indeed true, he noted, this would present a great danger to peace in Europe, for it was only religion that could get the Russian masses to go to war. 'Whatever the case,' he concluded, 'it is simply ridiculous to think that peace in Europe now depends on the murky wishes and the will of a cunning mystic or a simple adventurer. But in the land of unlimited impossibilities all is possible.'38
The speculation ran wild. A newspaper in Toulouse expressed the view that Witte had been able to use Rasputin to convince the tsar to align Russia with Germany against that 'godless country' of France.39 German papers (Vossische Zeitung, Berliner Tageblatt) opined that whereas in the past Rasputin had been powerful enough to keep the tsar from going to war, he could just as easily now use this same power to make him go to war. And yet another German paper - Deutsche Warte - wondered (when in the first days after Guseva's attack it was believed that Rasputin had been killed) whether he had been assassinated by those very forces in Russia who had opposed his politics of peace and now wanted to push Russia to war.40
Back in St Petersburg, Nicholas was inclined not to make too much of events unfolding in the capitals of Europe. He sent his condolences to Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria upon learning of the assassination and then moved on to other matters. Even after Austria delivered its humiliating, and unacceptable, ultimatum to Serbia on 10 July (23 July New Style), Nicholas described the development as nothing more than 'disturbing'. But several of his ministers were a good deal more animated by events. 'C'est la guerre europeenne,' foreign minister Sazonov remarked. The following day at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, Sazonov stressed upon the tsar the need to defend Russia's honour in the Balkans and to boldly respond to Austria's threat of invading Serbia. Not to act forcefully, he warned, would reduce the country to a second-rate power in Europe. The other ministers fell in behind the bellicose Sazonov.
Nicholas, however, refused to be pushed into going to war. He reached out to Kaiser Wilhelm, begging him in a number of telegrams to stop Austria from going to war and stressing the necessity of a peaceful resolution of the crisis. The signals coming from the Germans were contradictory, and the tsar's ministers continued to press the case for war. Adding their voices to Sazonov's were now General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, minister of war, General Nikolai Yanushkevich, chief of the general staff, minister of agriculture Alexander Krivoshein, as well as Duma president Rodzyanko. Eventually the tsar broke down and gave in. On 17 July, he ordered full mobilisation of the Russian army for the following day. War was now inevitable. When Alexandra learned of this she rushed to Nicholas's office, where they argued for half an hour. The empress had been caught off guard by the move and was beside herself. She raced back to her room, threw herself on to her couch and started to cry. 'It's all over,' she said to Vyrubova, 'we are now at war.' As for Nicholas, Vyrubova noticed he seemed at peace. The agonising question that had been hanging in the air had now been answered.41
On 19 July (1 August New Style), Germany declared war on Russia. Rasputin telegraphed Vyrubova a message for Nicholas and Alexandra: 'My dear darling ones! Don't despair!'42 The following day he sent a cable directly to Nicholas:
'My dear and darling, we treated them with love while they were preparing their swords and misdeeds for us for years, I am convinced: everyone who has experienced such evil and cunningness will get a hundredfold punishment; God's mercy is powerful, we will remain under its cover.'43
On 24 July, Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia. Rasputin wired a message of hope to Alexandra: 'God will never take His hand from your head, He will give you consolation and strength.'44
As insistent as Rasputin had been for peace, now that war had begun he committed himself to victory and never again did he question the righteousness of Russia's cause nor waver in the need to fight until she was victorious over her enemies.45 He wired to Vyrubova on 26 July:
Everyone, from the east to the west, has come together with the same spirit for the Motherland, this is a great joy.46
Rasputin again wrote of his confidence of Russia's victory in war to Nicholas in the middle of August:
God is wise and shows us glory through the cross, you will win with this cross. The time will come. God is with us, the enemies will tremble with fear.47
A week later Rasputin was released from the hospital and left straightaway for the capital. On 22 August he was received by Nicholas.48 With his return came the usual salon gossip. The French ambassador Maurice Paleologue recorded that Rasputin had told the empress how his miraculous survival was further proof of God's care for him. And there was a good deal of speculation on what stance Rasputin had taken with regard to the war. Paleologue, for one, thought that Rasputin had been urging Nicholas to seek an alliance with Germany, although, like a good many members of the upper classes at the time who couldn't imagine a peasant having his own ideas, the ambassador was certain that Rasputin had not come to this notion on his own, but was simply repeating the phrases fed to him by Prince Meshchersky.49
As for the press, the St Petersburg Courier now reported that Rasputin not only endorsed the war, but was planning on enlisting himself and heading to the front. Such was the word at the salon of Countess Sophia Ignatieva, and when Rasputin's female followers heard of this they raised a cry of worry, insisting he not place himself in any danger.50 The story in the Courier so upset one government official, a certain I. A. Karev serving in Dagestan, that he felt he had to write to Rasputin himself:
I learned from the newspapers the other day that you are planning on leaving for the field of battle, and as every Russian must sacrifice himself for the defence of the Fatherland, so is your intention of the greatest merit, but please stop and think - this terrible war and its horrors have already devoured a great many lives and you too shall not escape this fate, yet by remaining where you are, so shall you still bring a great benefit to humanity. If your wish to leave for the war is steadfast and you nonetheless want to go there, then go with God, many will be praying to God for you [...].51
Needless to say, Rasputin never did go off to war, nor did he ever have any intention to.
Rasputin never wavered after this point in his support of Russia's war effort. His notes and telegrams to Nicholas and Alexandra for the next two years convey one and the same message: that if the tsar remains firm and resolute, God will bless Russia with victory.52
It is one of the strange ironies of Rasputin's life that regardless of his actual commitment to the war, in the eyes of a great many Russians he came to be seen as an agent of the Germans secretly working to secure a separate (and, to most, traitorous) peace. There never was, nor is there now, any evidence of this outlandish claim, but to contemporaries the existence of 'Dark Forces' led by Rasputin and the empress Alexandra selling out the country to the Huns was taken as indisputable fact.53 Russians would have been amazed to have known that by the final months of Romanov rule Rasputin was in fact trying to save the dynasty. One of his chief preoccupations by the autumn of 1916 was the food crisis in Russia's major cities, the danger of which - for the regime - he intuitively sensed, and he repeatedly urged the tsar to act on the matter, even offering specific steps to alleviate the problem.54 But by then Rasputin's days, and those of the dynasty, were numbered. Early in the hours of 17 December (30 December New Style) Rasputin was murdered in cold blood in the Petrograd mansion of Prince Felix Yusupov. His killers insisted they had acted solely out of patriotism, as if the assassination of a Siberian peasant might save the regime. Alexandra would go to pieces at his death, Yusupov believed, and would be shut up in either a convent or asylum, while the tsar, finally liberated from the influence of the 'Dark Forces', would lead Russia to victory on the battlefield and stem the tide of chaos sweeping the country.55 The reasoning is stunning for its naivete.
Although news of the murder was initially met with euphoria, soon notes of concern could be heard.
Pavel Zavarzin, the former head of the Moscow Security Bureau (aka Okhrana), recalled travelling in a train across central Russia soon after the murder. He was reading about the details in the newspaper along with his fellow passengers in the restaurant car when one man, a middle-aged Siberian merchant, broke the silence: 'Thank God that they've killed that bastard.' With that, everyone began to speak at once. A dog's death for a dog,' he heard some state. But others saw something wrong in the affair. One man was heard to say that a true nobleman doesn't invite a man into his home to kill him, and another that the murder by men so close to the throne amounted to a knife in the back of the Russian sovereign. 'It's a sign of chaos and the inevitable revolution,' said a bearded Siberian man in glasses, and with that sharply stood and left the car.56
The fact that Rasputin's murderers were aristocrats was not lost on the common folk. A society lady in Petrograd overheard wounded soldiers in a military hospital complaining, 'Yep, only one peasant managed to make his way to the Tsar, and so the nobles killed him.' It was a fairly common opinion among the masses and helped fuel the hatred of Russia's upper classes that was soon to erupt with white-hot fury.57 A peasant from Pokrovskoe told Sergei Markov while travelling through Rasputin's village in early 1918 that the 'Burschujs' had killed Rasputin since he had defended the interests of the poor folk before the tsar.58
Not only had Yusupov and his fellow conspirators failed to save the monarchy, they had helped to hasten its demise. As Alexander Blok famously, and correctly, noted, the bullet that felled Rasputin 'struck the very heart of the ruling dynasty'.59
THE LAST TSAR
March 1917 donald Crawford
else for that matter, who could have credibly foreseen that within the year the Russian state would have disintegrated - the Romanov dynasty swept aside and its successor, the forerunner of what had appeared its future as the new socialist republic, brought down in the disorder. There was nothing in this to justify any claim to 'historical inevitability', but everything to remind the world that cometh chaos, there is only hindsight to explain the outcome.
True, the enforced abdication of Emperor Nicholas II could be seen as inevitable, given that he had by then alienated almost the entire political establishment as well as a large part ofthe wider Romanov family. In the midst of a disastrous war with Japan he had survived the revolution of 1905 by reluctantly yielding to demands for an elected parliament, the Duma, albeit with ministers answerable to him. In the midst of a war with Germany he stubbornly ignored demands for a government appointed by and responsible to that same Duma. Autocracy not constitutional monarchy was to remain the model for imperial Russia.
' the turn of 1917 there was no one in Russia, or anywhere
Much of the blame for his downfall could rightly be placed at the door of his interfering and dominating German-born wife, Empress Alexandra. When Nicholas took over as Supreme Commander in 1915 and removed himself to the Stavka, his front-line headquarters over 400 miles away at Mogilev, he gave his wife control of the ministersleft behind in the capital Petrograd. Progressively over the next couple of years the government became her government, with ministers appointed only with the approval of her hated 'holy man', Grigory Rasputin. His hold over the empress stemmed from her belief that only his 'divine spirit' could protect the life of her haemophilic son Alexis. However, since the boy's disease was a secret kept from the world, it saved neither from the contempt of both society and the political establishment.
In consequence, the news in mid December 1916 that Rasputin had been murdered - not by political terrorists but by Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, both members of the imperial family - was cheered across the country. That was followed by wild talk of a palace coup led by the three Vladimirovich brothers, Grand Dukes Kirill, Boris and Andrei, which envisaged Alexandra being taken away and confined in some far-distant convent. Nothing came of it but it served to confirm opinion in the capital's salons that the days of 'that woman' were numbered.
But there was no intent to bring down the Romanov dynasty itself: the consensus was that Nicholas, forced from the throne, would be succeeded by his twelve-year-old son Alexis, in accordance with the law, and with Nicholas's younger brother Michael Alexandrovich as regent. Michael was a war hero, a cavalry commander holding Russia's two highest battlefield awards, and was known to be sympathetic to constitutional monarchy on the British lines; the army held him in high regard and he would also be a popular choice in the Duma where he was widely trusted and respected.
Of the several political conspiracies emerging the most serious was headed by one of the Duma's most influential party leaders, Alexander Guchkov, who feared that without change there was high risk of left- wing extremists taking to the streets and facing Russia with a second revolution.
His alternative was to be a bloodless palace coup - to capture the tsar's train while it was travelling between the capital and the army headquarters at Mogilev, and thus present the country next morning with a fait accompli. Guchkov was confident that popular support would then oblige the tsar to concede his throne.
A second and unrelated plot went to the heart of the Stavka itself where General Mikhail Alexeev, the chief of staff, supported it. One of the principals was Prince Lvov, the popular leader of the civic and volunteer organisations across Russia. Their intention was to arrest Alexandra on one of her regular visits to Stavka, and compel the tsar to remove her to Livadia; if he refused, as they knew he would, then he would be compelled to abdicate - with the same result as in the Guchkov plot: a boy emperor with his uncle Grand Duke Michael as regent. Although plans had not been finalised and there was much work to be done, the conspirators in both camps felt certain of success. For the Guchkov plotters, believing they would be ready to strike in March, what was clear was that removing this weak tsar and his dangerous wife was both a necessity and inevitable if tsarist Russia was to be saved from itself.
History, as is so often the case, had other ideas. The future of Russia was not to be determined by an elite few but by the clamour of a street mob that as yet had no idea that it might have any role at all.
It was a spontaneous uprising, with no master plan or even a decisive leader who could be identified afterwards. Unrest became disturbance, disturbance grew into rebellion, and then in turn into revolution. And yet all this was in large part confined to the capital, with the rest of the country unaffected, at least in the beginning, and with some regions unaware of events until they were all over.
The ostensible cause was fear of a bread shortage; although supplies were adequate the fear was self-fulfilling in that housewives hoarded, creating the shortage. But that was only one of many factors. There had been large-scale strikes, following a lockout of workers at the giant Putilov factories, with an estimated 158,000 men idle by late February.
Petrograd itself was a vast military camp, with 170,000 armed troops in barracks, many of them susceptible to agitators - among them
German agents actively fomenting resentment in the hope of bringing about a revolution that would remove Russia from the war.
Suddenly, on Saturday 25 February (10 March New Style), that threat of revolution turned into reality. It was not just that six people had died that day but that one of those killed was a police inspector who, intent upon seizing a protestor's red flag, was killed by a Cossack trooper as he rode into a crowd of demonstrators. The Cossacks were the traditional scourge of rioters and demonstrators - and if they were no longer reliable, no one was.
By the next day, Sunday, the number of dead had risen to 200. More ominously, a company of the elite Pavlovsk Guards had mutinied in their barracks, attacked their colonel, and cut off his hand. With that, it was revolution or the hangman's noose.
A desperate Mikhail Rodzyanko, leader of the Duma, telegraphed the tsar. 'The capital is in a state of anarchy. The government is paralysed... General discontent is growing. There is wild shooting in the street. There must be a new government, under someone trusted by the country,' he urged, adding that 'any procrastination is tantamount to death
Reading that, Nicholas dismissed it as panic. 'Some more rubbish from that fat Rodzyanko.' However, he did decide to put together a loyal force and despatch it to the capital, with he himself returning to his home at Tsarskoe Selo, thirteen miles south of Petrograd. That should settle matters. The rebel soldiers were no more than an armed rabble. They would never stand against proper front-line troops.
That complacent view was easier held in Mogilev than in the streets of Petrograd. The rebels indeed were not front-line soldiers but depot reservists, many of them new recruits, the scrapings of the military barrel. Military discipline was a thin veneer that was easily stripped away, turning such troops into a uniformed mob. Nevertheless, they had guns and were as well armed as any soldiers being sent to face them. By noon on Sunday, only some twenty-four hours into the disorders, 25,000 troops had gone over to the side of the demonstrators; the bulk of the available forces, however, simply stayed in their barracks as the rebels and the mob took command of the streets.
The Arsenal on the Liteiny was captured, putting into the hands of the rebels thousands of rifles and pistols, and hundreds of machine guns. The headquarters of the Okhrana, across the Neva and opposite the Winter Palace, as well as a score of police stations, were overrun and set on fire. The prisons were opened and their inmates freed, criminals as well as political detainees. By the evening of that second day, only the very centre of the city, around the Winter Palace, could be said still to be in government control. Guchkov's plan to pre-empt any such uprising had been overtaken by events. As the tsar's brother Grand Duke Michael noted in his diary that night, it was 'the beginning of anarchy'.
At its home in Petrograd's Tauride Palace the Duma was in uproar. Just thirteen days after the start of its new session, deputies arrived to find that the Duma had been shut down again. Prince Golitsin, the third prime minister in the past year, had used a 'blank' decree from the tsar to prorogue the Duma, thinking it would defuse tension by silencing the more radical elements.
He was wrong. The deputies refused to disperse, adjourned to another chamber, and set up a 'temporary committee' that then claimed to be the de facto government. That said, it had no idea of what might happen next, and nor did its leader, Duma president Rodzyanko. 'What shall I do? What shall I do?' Rodzyanko cried out in vain hope of any answer.
So Rodzyanko turned to the only man he thought could rescue them. He slipped out of the chamber and telephoned Grand Duke Michael at his home in Gatchina, twenty-nine miles south, urging him to come to the capital immediately.
Michael did just that. His special train left at 5 p.m. and an hour later in Petrograd he was whisked away to the Marie Palace on St Isaac's Square to join an emergency conference attended by the prime minister, Golitsin, and his chief ministers, together with Rodzyanko and other leading members of the Duma's new 'temporary committee'.
In the government there was only resigned defeatism. That evening the hated interior minister Protopopov had been persuaded to resign and as he shuffled off into the night he muttered that there was nothing now left to him 'but to shoot myself'. No one cared what he did and no one bothered to say goodbye to the man so trusted by the empress, so despised by the nation.
Yet his departure was also its own signal that the government was no more. Golitsin accepted that his ministry was finished, but admitted that he did not know how to write out the death certificate. He hoped that Grand Duke Michael would do that for him.
As the conference agreed, with Golitsin having thrown in the towel, the only hope now was that Michael would take over control in the capital, and rally loyal troops to his side, including the relief force the tsar had promised Rodzyanko. He was a famous general, and the army would do as he demanded. He would also need to form a new government, which in turn meant the tsar formally appointing his brother as regent in the capital.
Rodzyanko confidently expected that he would be the obvious new 'strong man' premier and was visibly dismayed when instead Michael proposed Prince Georgy Lvov - the preferred choice of the leading Duma men and its own evidence that Michael knew more about what was going on among the key political leaders than the surprised Rodzyanko.
Lvov was not a member of the Duma, but as long-time head of the powerful union of local authorities, the zemstvos, he was the best- known civic leader in the country and more popular and more trusted among the radical elements than the authoritarian bull-voiced Rodzy- anko. The majority Progressive Bloc in the Duma had already opted for Lvov, and now, named by Michael, it was Lvov who was endorsed at the two-hour conference.
In the event they were all wasting their time. Leaving the Marie Palace for the War Ministry across the square, Michael began his despatch to his brother on the Hughes apparatus, a primitive form of telex. He set out succinctly what had been agreed at the conference, and that the situation had become so serious that every hour counted. The reply came forty minutes later, passed on through chief of staff General Alexeev. Almost dismissive, it ignored Michael's proposals, but said that the tsar would return next day to Tsarskoe Selo and also send four infantry and four calvary regiments to restore order. Then, at 11.35 p.m., snubbing Michael, Nicholas telegraphed Golitsin to say that 'I personally bestow upon you all the necessary powers for civil rule.'
But by then it was too late. Golitsin and his ministers had drifted away into the night and there was no prime minister and no civil rule. Later, Michael would sum up the story of those futile hours with one word in his diary: Alas.
At 5 a.m. in the pre-dawn of Tuesday, February 28, the train carrying the tsar back to Tsarskoe Selo left Mogilev, its windows darkened, its passengers asleep. The start time had moved forward because it had been decided to take a roundabout route back, so as to leave the direct line to Petrograd clear for the relief force that had been ordered. The change would mean that he would arrive home at around 8 a.m. the following morning, Wednesday.
'Every hour is precious,' Michael had told his brother on his wire on Monday night, urging him not to leave Mogilev at all so that he could be in direct communication throughout the crisis. On his train, Nicholas would be virtually incommunicado. Russia no longer had a government and over the next crucial twenty-seven hours or more it would, for all practical purposes, be without an emperor. Nevertheless, when he reached Tsarskoe Selo the next morning the tsar expected to hear that General Nikolai Ivanov and his 6,000 front-line troops were in place to crush the rebellion. He could sleep easily. His train was on schedule and at 4 a.m. the next morning he was less than 100 miles from Tsarskoe Selo, having covered 540 miles since leaving Mogilev.
It was then that the train abruptly stopped, at the town of Malaya Vishera, with the alarming news that revolutionaries had blocked the line ahead. Since the train had only a few guards aboard, fighting their way forward was out of the question. There was only one choice for them: to go back to Bologoe, halfway between Petrograd and Moscow, and then head west for Pskov, headquarters of General Nikolai Ruzsky's Northern Army. It was the nearest safe haven, though it would still leave Nicholas 170 miles from home and worse off than if he had stayed in Mogilev where he could command the whole of his armies. His journey had been entirely wasted.
'To Pskov, then,' he said curtly and retired back to his sleeping car. But once there he put his real feelings into his diary. 'Shame and dishonour', he wrote despairingly. The journey to Pskov meant that for the next, and decisive, fifteen hours - until about 7 p.m. that Wednesday evening - the Emperor ofAll the Russias would once again vanish into the empty snow-covered countryside, a second day lost.
In consequence, with no government and a nomadic tsar lost in a train, power in Petrograd passed on Tuesday 28 February to the revolution, with the Tauride Palace home of a Duma that was no more. Instead, it now housed a noisy mass of workers, soldiers and students, joined together in a new organisation, a Soviet on the lines of the 1905 revolution. The few hundred respectable deputies who backed the Temporary Committee of the Duma now jostled for places in rooms and hallways packed with excited street orators, mutineers and strike leaders. It was chaos and would remain so for days to come.
In that crush, the young man beginning to stand out as the dominant figure was Alexander Kerensky, a member of the Temporary Duma Committee but also vice-chairman of the new 'Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies'. Bestriding both camps, his power was enormous, with the Duma deputies recognising him as their only bridge to the new Soviet, the master if it chose to be. The Temporary Committee of the Duma had the better claim to government, but its members knew that in this revolution they could only lead where Ker- ensky was willing to follow.
At the same time, the Soviet had the sense to know that they were in no position to form 'a people's government' - their authority did not extend beyond the capital, and they had few if any among them with the experience to act as ministers. There had to be a deal, and for the Duma men that meant securing the tsar's abdication while preserving the monarchist system itself, by the same means earlier intended by the plotters in their ranks: Nicholas would be replaced by his lawful successor, his son Alexis, with Grand Duke Michael as regent.
But Nicholas had first to be compelled to give up the throne - and trundling around Russia in his train, he had, as yet, no idea that that was what was being demanded of him.
As the tsar had hoped, his train did eventually reach Pskov at around 7 p.m. that Wednesday evening, after travelling 860 miles in total but still almost 200 miles from his intended destination of Tsarskoe Selo. However, at least he was back in contact with the world, albeit one very different to that he had left thirty-eight hours earlier.
Not knowing what time his train was to be expected, there was no one at the station to meet him, though shortly afterwards the army commander, General Nikolai Ruzsky, turned up, his manner unwelcoming.
He did not bring good news. What of those relief troops that Nicholas had sent to the capital? The answer was that with no orders, no tsar, and no one in authority, General Ivanov had simply abandoned his task and turned back. The capital was lost and would stay lost.
In the tsar's study aboard the train, Ruzsky believed that Nicholas now had no option but to grant the concessions demanded of him and he said so, doggedly, over a gloomy dinner. As stubborn as ever and still blind to his own peril, Nicholas refused to give up his autocratic powers, though he conceded that he was willing to appoint Rodzyanko as prime minister, albeit with a cabinet responsible to the tsar.
Ruzsky was getting nowhere until a telegram arrived from General Alexeev at Mogilev, urging the same concessions. Nicholas, now in an uncomfortable corner, sought compromise. He insisted that, whatever else, the ministers for war, navy and foreign affairs should continue to be accountable to him. Ruzsky would not even concede that.
Nicholas went to his sleeping car a rattled man. In refusing the demands of politicians and dismissing the pleas of his brother and others, he had assumed the absolute loyalty of his senior military commanders. Now they, too, seemed to be against him. At 2 a.m. he called Ruzsky to his carriage and told him that he had 'decided to compromise'; a manifesto granting a responsible ministry, already signed, was on the table. Ruzsky was authorised to notify Rodzyanko that he could now be prime minister of a parliamentary government.
However, that proved only how little the tsar knew of what had happened in the capital since Michael had wired him at 10.30 p.m. on Monday night, a little more than forty-eight hours earlier. When, at 3.30 a.m., Ruzsky got through to Petrograd on the direct line, Rodzyanko's reply was shatteringly frank: 'It is obvious that neither His Maj esty nor you realise what is going on here ... Unfortunately the manifesto has come too late ... and there is no return to the past ... demands for an abdication in favour of the son, with Michael Alexandrovich as Regent, are becoming quite definite.'
When Ruzsky finished his painfully slow discussion on the direct wire, it was 7.30 a.m. that Thursday morning, 2 March. It was only then that Ruzsky knew that the crisis in Petrograd had moved beyond demands for a constitutional monarchy to that of the abdication of Nicholas. He therefore sent on Rodzyanko's taped message to Alexeev at Supreme Headquarters and at 9 a.m. on the same morning Alexeev cabled his reply: 'My deep conviction that there is no choice and that the abdication should now take place ... but there is no other solution.'
Having made his own views clear, at least to Ruzsky, Alexeev - less pained than he pretended - sent out his own telegrams to his other army commanders and to the admirals commanding the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. Russia had a war to fight and Alexeev was determined that the revolution in Petrograd should not undermine the front-line armies waiting to begin their spring offensive.
'The dynastic question has been put point-blank,' he told his commanders. 'The war may be continued until its victorious end only provided the demands regarding the abdication from the throne in favour of the son and under the regency of Grand Duke Michael
Alexandrovich are satisfied. Apparently the situation does not permit another solution ...'
His cables went out at 10.15 a.m. Four hours later, at 2.15 p.m., he wired the emperor at Pskov giving him the first three replies. They would prove decisive.
The first, from 'Uncle Nikolasha', the former Supreme Commander sacked in 1915 and now commander on the Caucasus front, could not be more frank: 'As a loyal subject I feel it my necessary duty of allegiance in the spirit of my oath, to beg Your Imperial Majesty on my knees to save Russia and your heir ... and hand over to him your heritage. There is no other way ...'
The second, in like terms, was from Brusilov, Michael's former commander-in-chief, and the most successful fighting general in the army: 'The only solution ... is the abdication in favour of the heir Tsarevich under the Regency of Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. There is no other way out; otherwise it will result in incalculable catastrophic consequences.' The third was from General Alexei Evert, the commander on the western front: 'abdication is the only measure which apparently can stop the revolution and thus save Russia from the horrors of anarchy'.
Nicholas rose and went to the window, staring out unseeingly. He could not defy his generals and they had just passed a vote of no confidence in him, both as tsar and Supreme Commander. He could not sack them, nor could he argue with them. Suddenly he turned and said calmly: 'I have decided. I shall renounce the throne.' He made the sign of the cross and Ruzsky, realising the enormity of what had just been said, followed suit.
Two short telegrams were drafted for Nicholas - the first to Rodzyanko.
There is no sacrifice which I would not bear for the sake of the real welfare and for the salvation of our own dear Mother Russia. Therefore I am ready to abdicate the throne in favour of my son, provided that he can remain with me until he comes of age, with the Regency of my brother the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich.
That was the response that was hoped for by the Duma men - Nicholas gone, a boy emperor, Michael as regent. His second telegram, to Alexeev, was in similar terms. At 3.45 p.m. Nicholas told Ruzsky to send them out.
At that moment, Nicholas ceased to be tsar, Alexis was the new emperor and Michael was regent. Or so it was assumed when an excited Rodzyanko spread the word in the Duma. Indeed, the abdication was so generally known that in London Nicholas's cousin King George V that night wrote in his diary: 'Heard from Buchanan [the British ambassador] that the Duma had forced Nicky to sign his abdication and Misha had been appointed Regent.' The king was in no doubt about the reason: 'I fear Alicky [the empress] is the cause of it all and Nicky has been weak.'
That was exactly the verdict of the relieved Duma men as they began their negotiations with the Soviet over ending the revolution and forming a responsible government. The 'historically inevitable' had, it seemed, stepped in to save Russia. In fact, Nicholas was just about to demonstrate yet again that history only happens afterwards.
Before Nicholas's signed abdication had been signalled to Petrograd, two leading Duma men had boarded a train for Pskov, thinking they would only obtain that abdication by facing him directly. They were Guchkov, the architect of the earlier plot to arrest the tsar and compel him to go, and his co-monarchist Vasily Shulgin. For the next seven hours they would be out of touch with events, and arrive in Pskov at around 10 p.m. not knowing that in Petrograd the matter was taken as already settled.
But what as yet no one knew was that in those same hours Nicholas had changed his mind: yes, he would abdicate, but in so doing he would also remove his son from the succession. It would be his brother Michael not the boy Alexis who would be emperor.
Petulance? If you won't have me, then you won't get my son. That may have been the thinking in Nicholas's embittered mind, but behind it was a real worry that without the care of his family the fragile haemophilic Alexis could die, a possibility confirmed by Professor Sergei Fedorov, the court physician travelling with him. The professor could have no idea about the future plans for caring for the boy, but whatever these may have been, Alexis was always at risk. And in stating the obvious Fedorov gave Nicholas the excuse he was looking for.
Guchkov, expecting a fierce row, was stunned to find that Nicholas had not only already abdicated but had drawn up a second abdication manifesto removing Alexis from the succession. At a stroke it demolished a key aspect of the Duma men's argument - an innocent boy lawfully inherits the throne and a new responsible ministry is protected by Michael as regent.
Guchkov and Shulgin recognised the problem as they retired to discuss it with Ruzsky and two other generals. Could an emperor remove a lawful successor for health reasons? No one knew the answer, except perhaps that as an autocrat Nicholas could do as he liked. And neither of the Duma men welcomed the prospect of returning empty- handed to Petrograd; they decided therefore that they had no choice but to accept the second abdication as it stood. Filing back into the saloon they told him that they had agreed to his terms.
With that Nicholas took the manifesto into his study for amendment and signature. With the removal ofAlexis, it now read: 'We have judged it right to abdicate the Throne of the Russian state and to lay down the Supreme Power. Not wishing to be parted from Our Beloved Son, We hand over Our Succession to Our Brother Grand Michael Aleksandrovich and Bless Him on his accession to the Throne of the Russian state ...' A sealed copy of the abdication was handed over to Guchkov and another to Ruzsky for transmission to the army commands and to Petrograd and other key centres.
It was then 11.40 p.m. but it was agreed that the manifesto should be timed as of three o'clock that afternoon - as stated on the draft sent from the Stavka when Nicholas had first decided to abdicate, albeit with Alexis as his successor. That made this second abdication appear to have been signed at the same time as the first - and thus to seem its equal and not a belated substitute.
Just after midnight, when Guchkov and Shulgin, with their precious signed manifesto, headed back to the capital, the text of that second manifesto was being broadcast overnight to the world at large. Nicholas, in his turn, left Pskov for Mogilev, the headquarters from which he had departed with such confidence just forty-four hours earlier. Throughout the formalities he had given no sign of distress but within himself he was anything but calm. On the train he went to his diary and revealed his private agony: 'At one o'clock this morning I left Pskov with a heart that is heavy over what has just happened. All around me there is nothing but treason, cowardice, and deceit!'
As always with Nicholas, everyone was to blame but himself.
As news reached the Tauride Palace in the early hours of Friday morning that Nicholas had removed both himself and his son from the throne, panic set in among the Duma leaders. The deal which they had thought settled with a reluctant Soviet had depended in great degree on persuading them that the new tsar would be a harmless boy - not a tough battlefield commander with a high reputation in the army. Among the throng of mutineers, fearful enough that Michael would be regent, the immediate reaction was that, with Michael as emperor, their necks were more at stake than ever. Talk of a general amnesty would not save those who had killed their own officers.
But fear worked in two directions and Rodzyanko was one of those as scared of the revolution as the revolution was scared of the monarchy. Pavel Milyukov - a resolute monarchist and the newly-appointed foreign minister in what was now called the Provisional Government - would describe him as being in 'a blue funk'. But in that sense so was the new premier Prince Lvov, who sided with Rodzyanko's alarmist predictions. Emperor Michael would have to be abandoned; Nicholas had done for the Soviet what the Soviet did not dare to do on its own.
To save itself the new government would have to persuade Michael to give up the throne. The Duma men knew where he was. Kerensky, appointed justice minister, picked up a copy of the Petrograd telephone directory, flicked through the pages and ran his finger down the column to the name of Princess Putyatina. Her number was 1-58-48. A few moments later, at 5.55 a.m., the telephone rang in 12 Millionnaya Street.
Although the new ministers hoped to meet Michael even before he knew he had become emperor - and possibly had started acting as one - there was never any chance of it remaining a secret. At first light, thousands of troops in front-line units were cheering his name and swearing an oath of allegiance to Emperor Michael II. At Pskov itself, with Nicholas gone, a Te Deum was ordered for the new emperor in the cathedral. Even in far-off Crimea, people celebrated Michael's succession. Princess Cantacuzene, one of Petrograd's leading hostesses, remembered that Nicholas's portraits disappeared 'from shop windows and walls within an hour after the reading of the proclamation; and in their place I saw by the afternoon pictures of Michael Aleksandrovich. Flags were hung out, and all faces wore smiles of quiet satisfaction.'
In Moscow, where the garrison had also gone over to the revolution, although without any of the excesses in Petrograd, the succession of Michael was greeted by the rebels with 'wooden indifference', with no sign of the resistance so feared by Rodzyanko in the hothouse of the Tauride Palace - indeed, the opposite seemed true elsewhere in the capital.
Guchkov and Shulgin, arriving back from Pskov, cried 'Long live Emperor Michael' as they hurried from their train, cheered by the people as they went by. After Shulgin read out the manifesto, a transit battalion of front-line troops and the surrounding crowd responded with cheers that 'rang out, passionate, genuine, emotional'.
Shulgin suddenly became aware of an urgent voice telling him that he was wanted on the telephone in the station-master's office. When he picked up the receiver it was to hear the croaking voice of Milyukov.
'Don't make known the manifesto,' barked Milyukov. 'There have been serious changes.'
A few moments later the telephone rang again - the new Railway Commissioner was sending his own man to the station. 'You can trust him with anything ... Understand?' Shulgin understood perfectly. A few minutes later a messenger arrived and Shulgin slipped him the envelope bearing the manifesto. Taken to the transport ministry offices, it was hidden under a pile of old magazines.
In the Tauride Palace, such was the confusion among the 'Council of Ministers' that it was not until 9.30 a.m. that they were assembled, though without Guchkov and Shulgin who had been delayed in a confrontation with the rebel-supporting railwaymen.
By then one question had settled itself: the news was such common knowledge that the Soviet now also knew that Michael was emperor, and the resulting clamour among the mutineers left the Duma majority in no doubt what that meant for them. They had no choice but to insist upon Michael's immediate abdication - their own necks depended on it.
They would take a hastily drafted manifesto with them to Million- naya Street, and with luck bring it back signed by lunchtime. That should quieten the Soviet. The majority also agreed that Michael should be told that if he refused to sign, no one of them would serve as his ministers. He would be tsar with no government. It was him or us.
The apartment first-floor drawing room had been prepared to provide an informal setting. The settees and armchairs were arranged so that Michael, when he took the meeting, would be facing a semicircle of delegates. Lvov as premier and Rodzyanko as Duma president would lead the majority call for Michael's abdication, while Milyukov argued the minority case for preserving the monarchy, futile though that would be.
At 9.35 a.m., the delegates deciding that they could no longer wait for Guchkov and Shulgin, the drawing room door opened, ministers and deputies rose to their feet, and in walked the man being hailed across the country as His Majesty Emperor Michael II. He sat down in his tall-backed chair, looked around the men facing him, and the meeting began.
For Michael the first reality was to find that everyone addressed him not as 'Your Imperial Majesty' but as 'Your Highness' - thus, not as emperor but as grand duke. It was intended as intimidation, and they thought it would also speed up the clock.
Michael, looking around the room, could see that the Duma men were exhausted, unshaven, bedraggled and, as Prince Lvov would put it, unable even to think straight any more. Many were also clearly frightened, and that dread of the Soviet would be heightened by Kerensky, the only man in the room who could claim to speak for the mob. A master of the theatrical posture, Kerensky also claimed to be 'terrified', and that at any moment a gang of armed men might break in and murder the new emperor, if not the rest of them.
Rodzyanko also used fear as the excuse for abdication. 'It was quite clear to us that the grand duke would have reigned only a few hours, and that this would have led to colossal bloodshed in the precincts of the capital, which would have degenerated into general civil war. It was clear to us that the grand duke would have been killed immediately
Milyukov, with Guchkov not yet arrived, was the sole spokesman for those who believed that Rodzyanko and Lvov were leading the government to ultimate ruin, as would prove the case. Rousing himself, he argued that it would be immeasurably more difficult in the long term if the established order was simply abandoned, for in his reasoning the 'frail craft' of the self-elected Provisional Government, without a monarch, would soon be sunk 'in the ocean of national disorder'.
During all this shouting and argument, Michael had sprawled in his chair saying nothing. To Kerensky he seemed 'embarrassed' by what was going on and 'to grow more weary and impatient'. He had heard quite enough, and saw no point in hearing more.
He rose and announced that he would consider the whole matter privately with just two of the men in the room. To general surprise his choice fell on Lvov and Rodzyanko and not his principal supporters Milyukov and the recently arrived Guchkov. It could only mean that he had given in. Instead, what he wanted was reassurance that the new government was in a position to restore order and continue the war, and that they could ensure that the promised elections for a democratic Constituent Assembly would not be blocked by the Soviet. The answers were confidently 'Yes'.
Rodzyanko and Lvov returned to the drawing room, their faces barely concealing their triumph as they nodded to the others that all was settled. Michael hung back, talking to his long-serving personal lawyer, Alexei Matveev. When he too returned to the room, his face expressionless, no one took a note of what he said, and no one could afterwards remember what he said. Nevertheless it was enough to settle minds that he was abdicating.
There were sighs of relief. Nekrasov fingered the abdication manifesto in his pocket: We, by God's mercy, Michael II, Emperor and Autocrat of all theRussias ... After that preamble the rest could be filled in simply enough. It would need a few flourishes, perhaps, to give the required sense of occasion, but essentially 'abdicate' was the word that mattered. Allowing five minutes or so for regretful comments and funereal courtesies, Michael's manifesto could be in the Tauride Palace by lunchtime, with the Soviet obliged to hail their success. By late afternoon it could be posted all over the city.
In fact, it would turn out to be rather more complicated than that. Michael was not going to give them 'abdicate'. And, as if on cue, the drawing room door opened and the smiling figure of Princess Putyat- ina appeared to ask those who could to join her for lunch.
In their surprise no one seemed able to voice a protest. Unsure what to do, about half the men in the drawing room accepted the invitation and shuffled in to sit at the lunch table. They included Prince Lvov, Kerensky, Shulgin, Tereshchenko and Nekrasov, his unsigned abdication manifesto tucked back in his pocket. Princess Putyatina sat at the head of the table, with Michael at her right hand; lawyer Matveev and Michael's private secretary Johnson sat together at the end of the table.
Rodzyanko and the other ministers and deputies, confused, left the building and went back to the Tauride Palace, their victory delayed.
Since the Soviet was still unaware that there was a meeting with Michael, and as yet the returning delegates could not wave his abdication manifesto, there was nothing they could do but keep out of the way and fend off questions.
At the lunch table, conversation was polite, with no mention of the reason for their all being there, until lunch was finished and Princess Putyatina rose from the table and withdrew. The delegates then looked at Michael, waiting for the moment when he would formally provide his abdication; Nekrasov fingered again the manifesto in his pocket.
Matveev, having sat throughout lunch in silence, then asserted himself, asking Nekrasov to let him see what he had written down. Nekrasov handed it over, and Matveev read through it, then returned it with the air of a man who had found it wanting. Nekrasov glanced down at the paper: he had no experience of drafting a manifesto of this kind; had he missed something? Michael clearly thought so for he then suggested that Matveev 'should help set down in proper form what had taken place'.
Nodding towards Nekrasov, Matveev announced to the table that in order to prepare a proper manifesto for Michael's signature they would first need to have a copy of the original abdication manifesto signed by Nicholas, as well as a copy of the Fundamental Laws.
An embarrassed Prince Lvov knew from Shulgin that he had handed the manifesto over to some man from the transport ministry, but had no idea what had happened to it thereafter - that it was still hidden under a pile of old magazines. As for the Code of Laws - where could they get a copy of those?
The lunch table was now in disarray, any thought of a quick exit with a signed manifesto abandoned. Somehow, the lawyers were going to have to take over and since Michael had his own in Matveev they were going to need one themselves. The man they settled on was Vladimir Nabokov, and Prince Lvov volunteered to call him. For Michael he was a welcome choice: Nabokov's sister was a close friend of his family and her daughter a playmate of his seven-year-old son George.
With that, Kerensky and the Duma men, with the exception of
Lvov and Shulgin, decided to return to the Tauride Palace. There was nothing they could do here, and it was clearly going to be a long afternoon. Assured by Prince Lvov that they would be told as soon as the manifesto had been signed, they left looking rather more subdued than they had done on arrival almost six hours earlier. They were not sure how it had happened, but somehow Michael now seemed to be in charge.
At almost that very moment a telegram was sent to Michael from Sirotino, a railway station some 275 miles from Pskov. Nicholas, having 'awoken far beyond Dvinsk', had suddenly remembered that he had neglected to mention to his brother that he was the new emperor. He hastily scribbled out a telegram, despatched at 2.56 p.m. and addressed to 'Imperial Majesty Petrograd'. It read:
To His Majesty the Emperor Michael: Recent events have forced me to decide irrevocably to take this extreme step. Forgive me if it grieves you and also for no warning - there was no time. Shall always remain a faithful and devoted brother. Now returning to HQwhere hope to come back shortly to Tsarskoe Selo. Fervently pray God to help you and our country. Your Nicky.
As so often during the past days, Nicholas had acted when it was too late to matter. However, at least it was delivered, unlike the last telegram sent to him, and returned Address Unknown.
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