1927.] Count Benckendorf's 'Last Days at Tsarskoe-Selo.' usurped grandeur, told the Tsar as late as 3rd June "that he intended to set out for the front, in order to try to start an offensive, and make a vigorous effort to help the Allies. He counted on his eloquence to instil courage into the troops, and to bring about a victory.' Poor silly creature! What could his eloquence avail against the cunning of Lenin and Trotsky, who were then just beginning their job? The Emperor, we have said, had been abandoned by all. In his first talk with Count Paul Benckendorf after his arrival at Tsarskoe-Selo, he showed him "the telegrams of the generals commanding the different fronts, who all, with one accord, had told him that the only means of saving the monarchy was to abdicate in favour of the heir-apparent. Even the Grand Duke Nicholas was of this opinion, and begged him on his knees.' And all the while General Ruzski, himself half a revolutionary, was "rudely insistent " that the Emperor should renounce his responsibilities. It is to be deplored that he took the fatal advice. It would have been better for himself, for the dynasty, for Russia, that he should have died an Emperor in the midst of his troops. But the violent persuasion of those who should have known better is at least an extenuation. "The Emperor, as Supreme Commander of the Army," says Count Paul, "had, in the presence of the enemy, 845 been betrayed by the generals, and had been forced to give way to pressure, because the last support of the monarchy, the Army, was going over to the revolutionaries. History has never known the like of this." And so the Emperor came to join the Empress at TsarskoeSelo. "Nicholas Romanov," cried out the sentry. "Let him pass," said the officer. Thus began the cruel punishment which ended in death. At the outset, when the Emperor had his own guard about him, his life was bearable. But the power was passing quickly from the Provisional Government to the Council of Workmen and Soldiers. The revolution was following its foreordained course. The Jacobins were getting all the power into their own hands. "The Duma," says Count Paul, "which was at first very proud of the stupid revolution which it had brought about, perceived that its power was at an end." And the change was felt nowhere more bitterly than in the palace of Tsarskoe-Selo. The physical discomforts, which brave men like the Tsar bear with equanimity, increased apace. There were no fires, because there was no wood. Wine was rationed, and food was scanty. Less easily tolerable was the attitude of the soldiers on guard, which, says Count Paul Benckendorf, "became more and more provoca、 tive. Quarrels with the servants were an everyday occur rence. They thought they had unnecessary insolence, and when the right to criticise the mode he came into the Emperor's of life of their Majesties; they presence, he was unable to considered their meals, which control his embarrassment. were simple enough, too abun- "He was in a state of feverish dant." agitation; he could not stand still, touched all the objects which were on the table, and seemed like a madman.” On his second visit, he insisted that the Emperor and Empress should be separated, and should meet only at meals. Feeling was running high in the town, and the extreme parties demanded the removal of the Empress, who, it was everywhere said, was the head of the counter-revolutionary party. Though he knew full well that she was not, he was already certain that his own position was insecure, and that he could save himself alive only by pandering to the extreme Bolsheviks. "They are after you,” he said, when he announced to the Tsar the necessity of his departure, "and very soon they'll be after me.” Then there entered upon the scene Kerenski, the poor fumbler, whose name has become a byword of impotence in every known tongue, and who will be remembered as the typical demagogue with ambition and no courage unto the end of time. Truly neither the Emperor nor Empress could count upon the aid of this weakling, already in fear of his own skin. Thus he is sketched by Count Paul Benckendorf on his first appearance: "He was dressed in a blue shirt, buttoned to the neck, with no cuffs or collar, big boots, and the affected air of a workman in his Sunday clothes. His manner was abrupt and nervous. He did not walk, but ran through the rooms, talking very loudly, and even his expression was shifty, and his whole physiognomy, al- There was no end to the inthough energetic, disagreeable." sults which were put upon the He spoke and held himself as Emperor, and at every personages of that kind always counter he showed his infinite speak and hold themselves. superiority to his tormentors. Before he saw the Tsar, he He behaved always with a made a revolutionary speech perfect serenity. Here is a to the guard, and then told specimen: “On a certain day the servants that they no longer the incoming guard was a served their masters, but were former sergeant-major, who, as paid by the people, that their soon as he had arrived at the business was to watch all that palace, had made himself conwent on in the palace, and to spicuous by his violent and his consider themselves under the revolutionary opinions. He orders of the commandant and wished to search the palace, the officers of the guard. He threatening every one with searched the palace with an worse treatment if he found anything suspicious. When the Emperor held out his hand, he moved back a step and said, 'Not for anything in the world.' Then the Emperor advanced a step and said, 'What have you got against me?' He remained open-mouthed, turned on his heel, and left the room." They Yet, despite their cowardice, the Bolsheviks had still the power to annoy him who had been their sovereign. One day the guard caught the heirapparent with a toy gun on his shoulder, and carrying in his belt a pouch full of wooden cartridges. This was more than the brave proletarians could endure. broke up into groups, delivered impassioned harangues, and demanded that the toy should be taken away from the child. The commandant at last consented to take it away, and, ingeniously pulling it to pieces, brought back the pieces hidden in his clothes. Another trivial episode caused a far higher excitement, and was ended only by an inquiry held before a judge. A soldier on duty reported that he had seen two officers kiss the hand of one of the Grand Duchesses. This was a piece of politeness which could not be overlooked by honest democrats. So the Soviet of the regiment called up the officers before a military tribunal, and charged them with being anti-revolutionaries. The servants and gardeners who were present in the garden where the gross offence took place were put into the witness box. The guilty officers were left unpunished, but transferred to another corps. The Emperor endured with composure all the petty insults and the grave discomforts which were put upon him. He went about the employments which he invented for himself as though these trivial duties were the work of his life. He gave his son lessons in arithmetic and Russian history. He delved and planted in the garden, until Kerenski, in terror for his own life, ordered ordered the departure of him and his family for Tobolsk. The departure was tardy and difficult; but at last the train was dispatched, and the Emperor, who as Count Paul Benckendorf said, was as calm and self-possessed as usual, made his last adieus. Count Paul, who remained behind, had no illusions. "I already feared the tragic end of this dear and good sovereign." His fear was justified. After a brief sojourn at Tobolsk the Emperor and his family were sent to Ekaterinburg, where their real martyrdom began. Ekaterinburg was to them what the Temple was to Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, and there they were murdered in cold blood and without a trial. Even at Tobolsk they suffered the last indignities. The soldiers of the guard proved their fitness to govern a great Empire by writing obscene words upon a swing set up for the young Grand Duchess; and when the Emperor and his children contrived to make a toboggan-run of snow and ice by way of and to display a complete recreation, it was destroyed indifference to the fate of the in a night as soon as ready, Emperor, who until is de since it was not necessary for thronement had been our loyal prisoners to divert themselves. ally. The lines of Shakespeare. which depict the fate of the fallen hero, are written in toe low a key to suit so ferce a tragedy as the Tsar's, yet they contain the essential truth At Ekaterinburg poverty and starvation were added to their other miseries, and when death came in June 1918 it came as a release. The Bolsheviks had proved their superiority as they thought, and their cowardice as is evident, by a deliberate system of torture and brutality. The account of these last months of sufferings is given by Count Paul Benckendorf with a moderation and a simplicity which should evoke the sympathy of all save the implacable "people." It bears upon every line the evidence of its authenticity, and it proves that the Tsar came triumphantly out of the ordeal. The reader has but to compare his bearing with the bearing of those who had set themselves over him to recognise that in every encounter he should have shamed his oppressors. And when the news of his death and the death of his Empress and her children came to Western Europe, there were no tears shed, no word of pity was heard. The Emperor, who before his fall had been received with rapture in the countries of the Allies, went unlamented to his grave. The politicians dared not to speak in his defence or publicly to mourn his murder, lest they should give offence to the "proletariat." There seemed to be a world-wide conspiracy to make light of the tragedy, "For time is like a fashionable host. That slightly shakes his parting guest by the band, And with his arms out-stretched, as he would fy, Graspe-in the comer: Welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing." When the Tsar was the parting guest, none shook his hand. The world was too busy grasping-in the Bolsheviks to think of him who had fought with us. The smile of welcome was there for Kerenski, or Lenin, or any of the masters who now hold sway in Russia, but never a sigh was heard for the Emperor, whose purgatory Count Paul Benckendorf has painted. And now that the curtain is drawn down upon the tragedy, what has been the good of it? If it be the object of government to make the governed happy and prosperous, have the successors of the Tsar proved either the justice of his treatment or their own competence to rule? Assuredly they have not. The Russia which was the creation of the Romanoffs has perished. A policy of murder, wholesale and indiscriminate, is all that Lenin had to offer in place of the justified autocracy of the Tsars. 66 It can never have been a simple task to govern Russia-a vast sparsely populated empire, which could be controlled only by a reverence for tradition and an obedience to the past. The best justification that the policy of the Tsars could have received is the complete collapse of Russia into a bloodthirsty barbarism since the removal of the Emperor Nicholas. It is not a sound principle to destroy by torture and murder vast multitudes of citizens. When Lenin declared that he would gladly put ninety millions to death, if only he might arrive at the particular form of democracy which was to his mind, he deprived himself of the right to condemn the tyranny " of the Tsars. The tyranny of the Soviets is infinitely crueller and more cunning than any tyranny ever exerted by one man upon his country. The ingenious wickedness of the Tcheka goes beyond all the previous experience of history. No fairminded observer can cast an eye upon the Russia of to-day and still remember the Russia of ten years ago without acknowledging an immense degradation. And if there were a certain amount of tyranny mixed with the autocracy of the Tsars, whose fault was it? Burke said long ago that "kings become tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels on principle." And whatever suppression there was in Russia was made necessary by those 66 rebels on principle," who knew no other instruments of politics than the Browning and the bomb. The purposed enemies of a vast empire, difficult of government, must be opposed and punished if that empire is not to perish. The subsequent career of Lenin and Trotsky has clearly demonstrated the wisdom of those who drove them out of Russia. Such disturbers of the peace are always safer in exile. What they have done to Russia, what they are trying to do to the rest of the world, is plain for us all to see. It is not the Tsar who is to blame for the severe treatment justly meted out to them. The Germans are the criminals who sent them and their poison gas back to Russia. Bitterly the Germans suffered for their cynicism. Though they won the peace of Brest-Litovsk for the moment, their own troops were infected by the virus of Bolshevism, and thus hastened an inevitable defeat. The sketch of the Tsar drawn by Count Paul Benckendorf shows us a man "intelligent, good, and well-meaning," who was willing to accept all sufferings if "he could leave Russia in order and prepare for his son an easy and happy reign." The task was too heavy for him. The "rebels on principle" hampered his designs and crippled his power of action. Especially "his character did 1 We owe this quotation to Mr F. W. Bain, whose pamphlet, 'Decapitated Russia,' we commend to our readers. |