In all these personnel changes the Tsarina’s hand was at work. With the Tsar at the Front, she now became the real autocrat (in so far as there was one) in Petrograd. ‘Lovy,’ she wrote to her husband, ‘I am your wall in the rear. I am here, don’t laugh at silly old wify, but she has “trousers” on unseen.’ The main telephone in the Winter Palace was in her drawing-room, where she sat at her writing desk before a portrait of Marie Antoinette. She liked to boast that she was the first woman in Russia to receive government ministers since Catherine the Great, and in these delusions she was encouraged by Rasputin, who effectively used her as a mouthpiece for his own pretensions to power. Her letters to Nicholas were filled with advice from ‘Our Friend’, as she liked to call the ‘holy’ peasant. ‘It’s not my wisdom’, she would write, ‘but a certain instinct given by God beyond myself so as to be your help.’ Or: ‘We, who have been taught to look at all from another side see what the struggle here really is and means — you showing your mastery, proving yourself the Autocrat without which Russia cannot exist.’ It seems there was almost no matter of state beyond Rasputin’s expertise. She would write to the Tsar with his recommendations on food supply, transport, finance and land reform, although she herself admitted that such things made her own head spin. She even tried to persuade her husband to base his military strategy on what Rasputin had ‘seen in the night’, although here Nicholas put his foot down.40
Most of the Tsarina’s ink was used on recommendations for appointments. She saw the world in terms of friends and enemies of the ‘hidden cause’ waged by Rasputin and herself. Ministers, commanders of the armed forces and members of the court all rose or fell in her favour according to where they stood in relation to the ‘cause’. The patronage of Rasputin was the quickest way up the greasy pole — and criticism of him the quickest way down. In the seventeen months of the ‘Tsarina’s rule’, from September 1915 to February 1917, Russia had four Prime Ministers, five Ministers of the Interior, three Foreign Ministers, three War Ministers, three Ministers of Transport and four Ministers of Agriculture. This ‘ministerial leapfrog’, as it came to be known, not only removed competent men from power, but also disorganized the work of government since no one remained long enough in office to master their responsibilities. Bureaucratic anarchy developed with competing chains of authority: some ministers would defer to the Tsarina or Rasputin, while others remained loyal to the Tsar, or at least to what they thought the Tsar was, although when it came to the crunch he never seemed to know what he stood for and in any case never really dared to oppose his wife. Boris Stürmer, the longest-lasting Prime Minister of the ‘Tsarina’s rule’, who replaced the senile Goremykin in January 1916, was best known as a provincial governor who had been accused of venality, and as an Assistant Minister of Interior who had been charged with incompetence. In Sazonov’s memorable phrase, he was ‘a man who had left behind a bad memory wherever he had occupied an administrative post’. The affairs of state proved utterly beyond him. He ran to the Tsarina and Rasputin so often for advice that even the extreme monarchist V. M. Purishkevich began to compare this ridiculous figure to Chichikov in Gogol’s Dead Souls, who, after calling on all the dignitaries of the provincial town, sat for a long time in his carriage wondering who to visit next.41
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Perhaps the most damaging change of personnel was the dismissal of Polivanov in March 1916. More than any other man he was responsible for the rebuilding of the Russian army after the terrible losses of the Great Retreat. Major-General Knox, the British military attaché in Russia, thought him ‘undoubtedly the ablest military organizer in Russia’ and called his dismissal ‘a disaster’. Polivanov’s crime, in the eyes of the Tsarina, had been his readiness to work with the public organizations in improving army supplies. ‘Oh, how I wish you could get rid of Polivanov,’ she wrote to her husband in January. ‘He is simply a revolutionist.’ His friendship with Guchkov, head of the War Industries Committees, was seen by the court with special alarm, since in November the Octobrist leader had invited elected workers’ representatives to sit with him on the committees’ central governing body. ‘I wish you could shut up that rotten war industries committee’, the Tsarina implored her husband in March, ‘as they prepare simply anti-dynastic questions for their meetings.’ As for Guchkov, she asked, ‘Could one not hang him?’42
