The self-oblivion of Akhmatova’s “Prayer,” which in 1915 may have seemed natural and timely, now first shocks, then horrifies. These are terrifying verses, almost blasphemous in their unprecedented, self-denying patriotism. They are particularly horrifying now because we know that none of the people who praised the poem during the war nor the author herself could even guess at how great the sacrifice Akhmatova offered would turn out to be.
Meanwhile, the war continued to chew up millions of human lives. A black cloud hung over Petrograd. To describe the prevailing conditions, Merezhkovsky coined the expression “brutifying,” which was picked up by other Russian intellectuals. Blok, returning from a walk to the Bronze Horseman, wrote, “On Falconet’s statue is a horde of boys, hooligans, holding onto the tail, sitting on the serpent, smoking under the horse’s belly. Total decay. Petrograd is finis.”
The gigantic state machine sputtered: it was falling apart. Nicholas II no longer held the reins of power. In a common view of the last Russian monarch, succinctly stated by one of his officials in his memoirs, “His wife ruled the state, and Rasputin ruled her. Rasputin inspired, the empress ordered, the tsar obeyed.”106
Like any epigram, it was an oversimplification. Rasputin’s murder by court conspirators in December 1916 did not stop the coming catastrophe. But the role of the personality (or rather its absence) in the fall of the Russian Empire is clear, if we mean Nicholas II himself. For in Russia, as an historian justly put it, “the ruler is not a symbol of the regime but is the regime.”107
One often hears that the quiet, amiable, and educated tsar, a model family man and a loving, gentle father, would have been the ideal constitutional monarch in a country like England. But for the single-handed ruling of enormous Russia at a crucial time, Nicholas lacked the talent, the wisdom, and above all, the determination. Instead, the emperor displayed stubbornness and an absurdly unyielding conviction that the people and the army adored their Tsar Father, that only the intellectuals, encamped in their “rotten Petersburg,” stirred up trouble.
This manner of ruling the country was unsurprisingly among the causes for Nicholas’s dethroning. In July 1918, he and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks in the Urals, where the royal family had been kept under guard by the local Soviet.
But in early 1917 Nicholas II had not even imagined such a horrible possibility, even though his empire and its capital in particular were coming to a boil. Zinaida Hippius recalled,
The war startled the Petersburg intelligentsia and heightened political interests…. Figures from the most varied spheres—scientists, lawyers, doctors, writers, poets—they all turned out to be involved in politics. For us, who had not yet lost human common sense, one thing was clear. War for Russia, in its present political condition, would not end without revolution.
By January 1917 even diehard monarchists like Gumilyov had lost faith in the efficacy of continuing the war. Gumilyov at that time, according to a friend, openly fumed about the “stupid orders” of the generals. This disillusionment with the system overtook the entire hierarchical ladder of the empire from Ensign Gumilyov to the highest officials. Telyakovsky, the director of the imperial theaters, kept amazingly frank diaries. “January 26, 1917. You have to be completely blind and stupid not to sense that the country cannot be ruled this way any more.” “January 29. Life is bad in Russia and has been for a long time, but now it’s becoming unbearable, because this is not merely bad ruling, this is a mockery of the subjects.”108 And so on, page after page.
Anarchy took over Petrograd, but it was just then that the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater put on perhaps the most famous production of prerevolutionary Russia—Mikhail Lermontov’s drama
