soon be granted. The long-expected ukase appeared on May 10th. It opened
on a note of repentance:

“A State cannot be solid unless it holds as sacred the traditions
of the past. We have failed in this, and God has punished us. The
sovereignty of ancient Russia was indissolubly bound up with ‘the
voice of the land,’ with the representatives of the people
assembled in council.”

For the first time the Romanoffs perceived that, centuries before their
dynasty was cradled, Russia had had a past, and a democratic past.

But the project of the new assembly, the first Duma, turned this avowal
into derision. The business of the representatives of the people was
merely to examine proposals which would be laid before the Imperial
Council: the Tsar alone could initiate and pass legislation. By further
regulations, in fact, the members of the Duma were put at the mercy of
the conservative Senate. The autocracy was maintained in all its
mediævalism. Liberals and radicals now united in a fierce demand of
reform. Russia was paralysed by a general strike and the suspension of
traffic. More than a million workers were on strike. In a momentary
panic the Tsar directed Count de Witte to draw up a list of reforms, and
on October 30th (1905) he issued the famous ukase which has since given
a name to the vast body of moderate Russian reformers (the
“Octobrists”). He would grant manhood suffrage, real national
representation, freedom of speech and religion, and so on. As usual, the
first breath of liberty let loose a passion of discussion.
The radicals and independents united to form the powerful body of the
Constitutional Democrats (the “Cadets,” or K.D.s). A council of labour
deputies was formed with the express purpose of holding the supreme
power when the Tsar had been deposed.

In brief, Russia was seen aflame with revolution. There were mutinies in
the fleet at Kronstadt and at Sevastopol, and the audacity of the more
radical elements led, at Moscow, to the futile and pathetic rebellion in
which large numbers of students lost their lives. The revolution was
premature. The troops were unprepared for revolt on such an issue as the
constitution, and the “Black Bands” everywhere aided the police and
dipped their hands in the blood of Jews and radicals. The active
rebellion was truculently suppressed, and the jails were packed to
suffocation. His reactionary advisers urged the triumphant Tsar to
refuse all concessions, but the rumble of the more moderate malcontents
was still heard on every side, and the promise of some sort of national
assembly had to be carried out.

It was in these circumstances that, on May 10th, 1906, Nicholas opened
the first Duma. The name had been invented by the reforming minister of
Alexander I, Speranski, and it represented the measure of popular
representation which might have been regarded as satisfactory in those
semi-feudal days. For a civilisation of the twentieth century it was
ridiculously inadequate, and it soon proved only a channel for the
comparatively safe release of the boiling, sentiment which filled the
country. Before the Romanoff dynasty fell it was customary for polite
journalists and essayists to explain that the excesses of the radicals
frustrated the work of the new institution. It is unhappily true that
the left wing of every reform-movement uses a rhetoric which is little
in accord with its loud insistence on justice, but in this case even the
work of moderate members of the Duma was obnoxious to the authorities.
Day by day the state of the Russian jails, the gross conduct of police
and military authorities, and the barbarous practices of their
subordinates were brought to light. Week by week men waited, and waited
in vain, for the further instalments of reform which had been promised.

The Duma grew more and more vehement in its attacks upon the Government.
The Cadets formed the majority of its members, and they formulated their
demands for adult suffrage, real parliamentary institutions, the
abolition of capital punishment, a political amnesty, the suppression of
the Imperial Council, and the expropriation of the large land-owners.
Goremykin, a tool of the palace-clique which had put him in the place of
Count de Witte, refused to comply, and on July 23rd the Tsar dissolved
the Duma. The measure was a failure, and Goremykin had to surrender his
place to Stolypin. The ejected Cadets retired to Finland, and appealed
to the people to refuse to pay taxes or render military service: for
which, three years later, they were condemned to imprisonment and the
loss of their civil rights.

Stolypin had the ingenious idea of severing the great mass of the
peasants from the radicals by separate concessions, and in October and
November the Tsar appealed for their support. They were put on the same
footing as other classes in regard to the right of entering the public
service or schools, the issue of passports, and in rural elections. They
were released from obligatory residence in the district in which they
were registered, permitted to take away their share of the communal
property, and protected from punishment without trial. By these means,
and by tampering with the electoral law (which he dare not yet alter)
Stolypin secured a second Duma in which the Cadets were greatly reduced.
Instead of 185 seats they now had only 108. But they still formed the
largest party, and their leader Golovkin was President of the Duma. In
face of their demands the Tsar authorised Stolypin to offer the
crown-lands and imperial estates to be shared amongst the peasants, but
the radicals were not appeased, and on June 14th, three months after the
opening of the Duma, Stolypin demanded a secret session in order to
consider an indictment of the Social Democrats, whose number had
increased to 77 at the last election. Almost the whole of them were
charged with complicity in a plot to undermine the loyalty of the army
and navy.

The Duma was still overwhelmingly radical--a sufficient commentary on
the Tsar’s claim that the mass of his people clung to the old
traditions--and refused to lend itself to this manœuvre. Two days
later, June 16th, Nicholas again asserted his power and dissolved the
second Duma. It was, he declared, not representative of the “Russian
spirit” and would not support his government in suppressing disorder. To
make it more representative of this Russian spirit, which was supposed
to animate the bulk of the population, he narrowed the electoral
qualifications, in violation of his 1905 ukase, and reduced the
membership from 524 to 442. The Cadets now sank from 108 to 45, the
Socialists from 77 to 17. The conservatives rose from 60 to 100, and the
Octobrists from 31 to 110. Liberalism, of one shade or another, still
greatly outweighed conservatism even in this mangled representation of
the Russian people; and assassinations, strikes, and fiery rhetoric
impressed upon Europe the grievances of those who were excluded from
representation. In the year 1907 there were 627 executions, and about
70,000 were sent into exile. In 1908 there were 786 executions, and the
number of exiles rose to 180,000. The population of the jails of Russia
rose from 91,000 in the year 1904 to 174,000 in the year 1910.

This was the “comparative tranquillity” which the chroniclers of Russian
events ascribe to the country between 1907 and 1917. Quarterly notices
of the number of political executions were put into small type in
English and American journals, and from the sombre silence that brooded
over the land there issued at times the lurid message of assassination.
In 1909 occurred the astounding revelation of the secret-police spy and
professed Socialist Azeff, and it became known that outrages were
instigated by the police in order to strengthen their system. The former
head of the police had to be sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; the
head of the secret police of St. Petersburg was assassinated. In 1911
Stolypin was permitted by the Tsar to suspend the Imperial Council and
the Duma, so that he could avail himself of the clause of the
constitution which enabled him to pass laws while the councils were not
sitting; and on September 14th, while Nicholas sat in his box in the
opera at Kieff, he had the horror of witnessing the murder of his
complaisant minister. Still he clung to his poor rags of autocracy.
Still religious adventurers and spiritist mediums plied their lucratic
charlatanry in the palaces. Still the flower of the young generation
rotted in the overcrowded jails or languished in Siberia. The jails had
a “maximum accommodation” for 107,000 prisoners, and in 1910
about 180,000 men and women were crowded into them. Typhus flourished in
them. Suicides of prisoners rose to 160 in a single month. The most
brutal outrages were committed on young women and men.

These facts one learned, as I experienced at the time, by a laborious
comparison of the statements of little-read writers and statistics. To
the world at large a different picture was offered. Men were told how,
in 1906, a group of affrighted Polish peasants, headed by an abbess,
came to St. Petersburg to inquire if it was really true that (as zealous
Roman Catholic proselytisers had told them) the Tsar had made his
submission to the Pope. They saw a minister, on Easter morn, and to
their solemn salutation, “Christ is risen,” he blunderingly replied,
“Good Day”; and their hearts sank. But they also saw Nicholas, and to
their faltering religious salute he replied cheerfully, “In truth He is
risen,” and they fell sobbing at his feet. Or it was the festival of
Poltava in 1909, when Nicholas, seeing his carriage surrounded by a
dense throng of peasants, alighted and talked familiarly with them for
two hours. And there was the story of how at Christmas, 1912, when the
members of the Duma were presented to him, he summoned the shrinking
peasant-deputies from the last row and honoured them above the others.
Nicholas II knew quite well what was happening in Russia. His small mind
thought that tasting the food of soldiers and sailors--before a
camera--visiting the hospitals, and embracing carefully-selected
peasants would save the autocracy in the twentieth century.

The five-year period of the third Duma expired in 1912, and the new
election proved a victory for the conservatives. The Octobrists had
ventured to resist the demand of the clergy that the elementary schools
should be handed over to them, and the popes had fiercely and
unscrupulously canvassed the peasant-electors. Still, however, 285
Octobrists and other radicals faced the 155 members of the Right, and
small measures of reform had to be passed. They were inadequate, and the
year 1913 saw another great wave of disturbance. The number of strikers
rose to 460,000. At Kieff a great gathering of representatives of all
the towns of the Empire condemned the Government. The Octobrists united
with the other radicals of the Duma and, by 146 votes to 113 (many
abstaining) condemned the ministers for not proceeding in the path of
reform. But I need not run in detail over events which are still fresh
in the general memory. These brief notices will suffice to indicate that
the spirit of progress lived and grew in spite of every effort of
Nicholas II to strangle it.

The conflict entered upon its last stage. That Nicholas II wanted war,
however much he may have hoped to profit by the aid of France and
England, we have no reason whatever to believe. Nor is it possible as
yet to pass a sober opinion upon the charge that he intended, when the
war dragged, to make a separate peace with Germany. That his German wife
was won by the miserable adventurer Rasputin, and some of his ministers
by German bribery, seems clear enough; and, although he had been second
only to the Kaiser in the vigorous lead of his nation until the end of
1916, there is grave reason to think that he was then won by the prayers
of his family and intrigues of his ministers. But the Russian revolution
was not based on this theory as much as is generally believed. The mass
of the people were bewildered by the war, and have not since shown any
great zeal to prosecute it. The educated malcontents were, as we saw,
thoroughly organised and ready to grasp any pretext for a successful
revolution. Only a minority of military men and liberal politicians were
essentially moved by the failure of the dynasty to arm Russia
efficiently and prosecute the war.

The food-supply was the immediate ground of the revolution. On February
8th, when the five-year period of the Duma of 1912 approached its term,
the Tsar was urged to extend its life, as was done in other countries.
The Tsar refused, and he spoke of elections in the coming fall. The
suspicion that he was going to proceed irregularly coincided with a
shortage of grain in the large cities, especially Petrograd (as the
capital was now named), which was gradually stirring the anger of the
people. We may assume that the revolutionary organisation exploited this
anger with all their power, and especially undermined the loyalty of the
few regiments which were left at Petrograd.

On March 8th the people of Petrograd, especially the women, began to
throng the streets, and the workers to quit the factories. Rodzianko,
the President of the Duma, summoned a conference on the food-question,
and he and Professor Milyukoff, the second hero of the revolution,
strongly criticised the incompetence of the ministers. Rodzianko, a
former officer of the Guards and husband of a Golitzin princess, was a
noble of distinction, but he was an Octobrist and a friend of the
people. The crowds were still larger in the streets on March 9th; and on
Sunday, the 11th, they turned out in immense numbers and fraternised
with the few troops who were visible. The guards, however, were
imperfectly won, and on the Sunday afternoon they fired a volley into
the crowd and about a hundred were killed or wounded. It is one of the
strangest testimonies to the amazing condition of Russia that the crowds
remained on the streets and said, sympathetically, to the soldiers: “We
are sorry for you, brothers, you had to do your duty.”

On the Monday morning it became known that the Tsar had suspended for
two months the sittings of the Duma and the Imperial Council, and the
revolution was inaugurated. Troops to the number of about 30,000 marched
upon the arsenal, distributed arms to the people, and fought the police
and the loyal troops. The Progressives and the Socialists formed a
committee of twelve of their ablest representatives, including
Rodzianko, Milyukoff, and Kerenski; and Rodzianko telegraphed to the
Tsar a peremptory demand for a new government. The fight with the
police, who mounted the roofs with rifles and machine-guns, was
continued on the following day, but the public buildings fell one by one
into the hands of the revolutionaries, and about midnight of the 13-14th
the enterprise was crowned by the submission to the Provisional
Government of the Preobrajensky Guards. Moscow soon sent its adhesion,
and the troops in the field gradually assured the new government of
their allegiance.

Nicholas II was with the army, at the headquarters of General Russky,
when the alarming news from Petrograd reached him. He would return to
the capital, he said; but at Bolgoe station he was quietly persuaded to
return to Pskoff. There, in a small, dimly lighted room, the last of the
Romanoffs received the delegates of the people--M. Gutchkoff and a
conservative member of the Duma. It is said that Nicholas asked calmly
what was required of him, and, when he was told that he must abdicate,
he at once demanded a piece of paper. He would not, however, resign the
crown to his son, as they wished. He would not be parted from his son,
he said: and it is probable that he was moved by his deep affection for
the boy. He would leave the throne to his brother Michael. The fateful
document was there and then composed, and Nicholas II signed away his
power: signed, as it proved, the death-warrant of the Romanoff dynasty.
He remains ambiguous in his last imperial pronouncement. In words of
singular dignity and detachment he answers the call of the Russian
people to lay down his autocracy, and he prays for a speedy victory over
Germany. But for the ghastly, unforgettable horrors which stain his
reign we could find words of admiration for the last weak descendant of
Michael Romanoff.

[The End]

End of Project Gutenberg's The Romance of the Romanoffs, by Joseph McCabe