Cixi backed the Boxers: ‘Perhaps their magic isn’t reliable but can’t we rely on the hearts and minds of the people?’ She declared war on the eight greatest nations on earth, even though ‘China is weak’, arguing that ‘If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I’d have no face to meet our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?’ As the eight nations fought their way into Beijing, Cixi, accompanied by the Guangxu Emperor, fled northwards, saying to her imprisoned enemy Consort Zhen, ‘You’re young and pretty, likely to be raped by the foreign soldiers. I trust you know what you should do’ – she meant suicide. But instead she had Zhen thrown down a well. Fleeing to Xi’an, at times sobbing as she suffered cold and hunger, she sued for peace – and returned to the Forbidden City.
Far away in London, the other empress was sinking. In January 1901, Victoria’s doctor sent a secret telegram from her palace at Osborne, Isle of Wight, to Kaiser Wilhelm: ‘Disquieting symptoms have developed.’ Willy had always craved Victoria’s love – ‘People have no inkling how much I love the Queen, how intimately she’s linked to my memories’ – and now confessed his fear that ‘she’s hopelessly ill … without my being able to see her again’. He rushed to London where Bertie tried to divert him, but Victoria’s condition deteriorated, so uncle and nephew hurried to Osborne. When the blind, semi-conscious queen awoke, her children didn’t mention that Willy was there. He was hurt, but finally the doctor led him to the sickbed on his own, after which she whispered, ‘The emperor’s very kind.’ Willy knelt next to the bed, supporting her with his right arm, ‘his eyes immovably fixed on his grandmother’. The kaiser and Bertie, now King-Emperor Edward VII, lifted the tiny queen into her coffin.
‘Although I’ve heard much about Queen Victoria,’ reflected Cixi, ‘I don’t think her life was half so interesting and eventful as mine … She had nothing to say about policy. Now look at me. I have 400 million dependent on my judgement.’ Cixi ordered elections for an assembly and reforms banning foot-binding and death by a thousand cuts, while founding schools for girls and awarding scholarships for girls to study abroad. Among the scholarship girls were Qingling and Meiling Song, the daughters of the Christian businessman Charlie Song, who now set off for Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Song’s secret ally, Sun Yat-sen, tried to launch further revolutions – which again failed. Sun waited in Japan.
Cixi had survived, but Tsar Nicholas kept his armies in Manchuria and accelerated his infiltration of Korea.* The Japanese regarded both Manchuria and Korea as theirs. The two sides started to negotiate. Nicholas could have struck a deal, taking Manchuria, ceding Korea, but instead, deluded by his visions of Asian empire and divine mission, he mocked Japanese challenges to Russia, insisting, ‘There will be no war,’ because ‘those macaques’ could never defeat Russians.
Nicky’s reign had so far been a limited success. His economy was booming, his Baku oilfields were producing half the world’s oil, but the workers pouring into the cities to work in the new factories and refineries* lived in appalling conditions and began embracing Marxist revolution. The tsar’s refusal to countenance any reform left the opposition no choice but to embrace revolution. His policy of promoting Orthodox Russians to rally support for the Romanovs alienated half his subjects: Catholic Poles, Protestant Finns, Jews, Armenians and Georgians.
In 1901, a young Georgian started to work at the Rothschild oil refinery in Batumi, secretly organizing strikes and sabotage: his name was Josef Djugashvili, son of a drunken, abusive cobbler and a devoted, pious mother who, determined that he should become a bishop, would do anything to get him into the Tiflis seminary where the use of Georgian was banned: the boys were beaten for speaking it. There, like thousands of other young people, Josef Djugashvili embraced a different faith – Marxism. He joined the Social Democratic Party, drawn to one of its leaders, Vladimir Ulyanov, who called himself Lenin, a cultured, well-off nobleman ferociously dedicated to revolution, who adapted Marx to fit Russia, creating a tiny vanguard to exercise a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ backed by terror. Djugashvili hero-worshipped Lenin: ‘my mountain eagle’. Later he adopted the name Stalin.
Nicky’s interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve suggested that ‘What this country needs is a short, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.’* Many politicians wish for a ‘short, victorious war’, but few are granted. Nicholas was sure that he was close to securing Manchuria and Korea.
