The Russian Revolution полностью

None of which would have mattered much were it not that the Empress saw herself obliged to compensate for her husband’s vacillating character by keeping him from making political concessions and eventually taking a direct hand in appointments: she frequently exercised a wife’s prerogative of turning her husband against people to whom, for one reason or another, she had taken a dislike. Treating Nicholas as a good-natured child (she liked to draw him as a baby in arms), she manipulated her husband by playing on his sense of duty and his suspicious nature. Although born and raised in Western Europe, she quickly assimilated the most extreme patrimonial attitudes of her adopted country. Time and again she reminded Nicholas of his heritage: “You and Russia are one and the same,” she would exhort him.¹⁷ After giving birth to a male heir, she made it her mission in life to safeguard unalloyed the institution of autocratic monarchy until the time when he would ascend the throne. By her actions she greatly contributed to widening the breach between the monarchy and society until it became unbridgeable: by 1916, even the staunchest monarchists, including many grand dukes, would turn against her and plot to have her removed. Her historic role in this respect was not dissimilar to Marie Antoinette’s.

To humor her, Nicholas usually followed his wife’s advice, but not slavishly; on rare occasion he could even oppose her wishes. They were a very loving couple, completely devoted to one another and usually of one mind. Both despised “public opinion,” which they identified with St. Petersburg society and the intelligentsia and viewed as an artificial “wall [sredostenie] erected to separate from them the adoring people.”* It has been said that when Nicholas used the word “intelligentsia” he made the same face as when pronouncing the word “syphilis.” He thought it should be erased from the Russian dictionary.¹⁸

Given the misfortune that dogged Nicholas in all his endeavors, it caused no great surprise that it also afflicted his domestic life. His wife bore four daughters in succession but there was no male heir. In desperation, she turned to charlatans, one of whom, a French physician by the name of Dr. Philippe, assured her that she was pregnant with a boy. Alexandra expanded in bulk until a medical examination in the ninth month revealed she had had a sympathetic pregnancy.¹⁹ When in 1904 a boy was finally born, he turned out to suffer from hemophilia, an incurable disease of which she had been the transmitter. The blow deepened Alexandra’s mysticism, but also her determination to see the child, christened Alexis, resplendent on the throne as Tsar of All the Russias.

The courtiers surrounding Nicholas II reinforced these preferences for anachronistic political practices. At the Tsar’s Court immense stress was laid on decorum and the observance of ritualistic forms:

The circle of intimates [of the Imperial family] consisted of dull-witted, ignorant remnants of dvoriane clans, lackeys of the aristocracy, who had lost the freedom of opinion and conviction, as well as the traditional notions of estate honor and pride. All these Voeikovs, Nilovs, Mosolovs, Apraksins, Fedoseevs, Volkovs—colorless, untalented slaves—stood at the entrances and exits of the Imperial Palace and protected the integrity of autocratic power. This honorary duty they shared with the Fredericks, Benckendorffs, Korfs, Grotens, Grünwalds—pompous, smug [Baltic] Germans who had sunk firm roots at the Russian Court and wielded a peculiar kind of influence behind the stage. The highly placed lackeys were united by a profound contempt for the Russian people. Many of them did not know Russia’s past, living in a kind of dumb ignorance of the needs of the present and indifference for the future. For the majority of them, conservative thought meant simply mental inertia and immobility. For people of this ilk, autocracy had lost sense as a political system, because their mental level was incapable of rising to general ideas. Their life flowed from one episode to another, from decorations to shifts on the ladder of ranks and honors. From time to time, the flow of events for them was interrupted by some shock—an uprising, a revolutionary upheaval, or a terrorist attempt. These portentous symptoms spread among them fear, even alarm, but never aroused their deep interest or attracted their serious attention. In the final analysis, everything reduced itself to hopes placed on a new energetic administrator or skillful police chief.²⁰

The monarchy governed Russia with the assistance of five institutions: the civil service, the security police, the gentry, the army, and the Orthodox Church.