*Compare this with the strikingly similar remark of Louis XVI. On being informed of his father’s death, he exclaimed: “What a burden! And I have been taught nothing! It seems as though the universe were about to fall upon me”: Pierre Gaxotte, The French Revolution (London-New York, 1932), 71.
*In fact, Nicholas himself had hardly any Russian blood in his veins: since the eighteenth century, through intermarriage with German and Danish families, Russian monarchs were Russians in name only. Their opponents liked to taunt them as the “Gottorp-Holstein” dynasty, which, genealogically speaking, was not far from the truth.
* A. A. Mossolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar (London, 1935), 127–31. Witte recalls that when he used the expression “public opinion” in the Tsar’s presence, Nicholas responded with passion: “And what is public opinion to me?”: S.lu. Vitte, Vospominaniia, II (Moscow, 1960), 328.
*The rules governing the Russian bureaucracy were formalized in Volume III of the Code of Laws: Ustav o sluzhbe po opredeleniiu ot pravitel’stva: Izdanie 1896 goda, Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (St. Petersburg, 1913). All further references are to this edition. In Imperial Russia the term neblagonadëzhnyi had legal standing and could lead to the dismissal from any state institution, including the universities. It was formally defined by Minister of the Interior N. P. Ignatev, in 1881: P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880kh godov (Moscow, 1964), 395.
* Bernard Pares, Russia and Reform (London, 1907), 328. According to one contemporary source, some Russian officials believed that treating their own population brutally enhanced the country’s standing abroad. Western powers, which provided Russia with loans, were said to be impressed by strength: “the more cruelly affairs were conducted inside Russia, the more her respect grew in Europe”: Die Judenpogrome in Russland, I (Köln-Leipzig, 1910), 230. There is, indeed, a relevant Russian proverb: “Beat your own people and others will fear you.”
*H.-J. Torke makes the interesting suggestion that the notorious venality of Russian officials was at least in part due to their self-identification with the state and the resulting difficulty of distinguishing private property from public: Jahrbücher, 227.
*It must be noted, however, that in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy it was not uncommon to find officials who resented the existing regime and sympathized with the opposition: Sergius A. Korff, Autocracy and Revolution in Russia (New York, 1923), 13–14.
*On this, see Maurice Samuel, Blood Accusation (New York, 1966). It is testimony, however, of the independence of the Russian judiciary of the time that notwithstanding immense pressure brought on it by the bureaucracy and the Church, the court acquitted Beilis. The role of anti-Semitism in late Imperial politics is dealt with in Heinz-Dietrich Loewe’s Antisemitismus und Reaktionäre Utopie (Hamburg, 1978), which lays stress on the identification of Jews with international capital, and Hans Rogger’s Jewish Policies and Right-wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).
*Exempt from his authority were the governors-general placed in charge of selected areas and accountable directly to the Tsar. In 1900, there were seven of them: one in Moscow, three in the troublesome western provinces (Warsaw, Vilno, and Kiev), and three in remote Siberia (Irkutsk, the Steppe, and the Amur River region). Combining civil with military authority, they resembled viceroys.
*S. Iu. Vitte, Vospominaniia, III (Moscow, 1960), 107. In 1905 Witte refused the post of Minister of the Interior because he did not want to become a policeman.
*IM, No. 2–3 (1935), 133. Von Laue cites Witte to the effect that “a modern body politic cannot be great without a well-developed national industry”: Theodore H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York-London, 1963), 262.
*Bertrand Gille, Histoire Economique et Sociale de la Russie (Paris, 1949), 163–65. According to Geoffrey Drage [Russian Affairs (New York-London, 1904) 287], in 1900, 60.5 percent of the Russian railroad network was state property.
