Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

Alley was a military man, not a socialite, but he understood the Russian ruling class because he had known them since he was born. Bruce Lockhart would probably have said he was ‘incapable of forming a reliable political judgement’, but his upbringing and experience of work in Russia would have helped him to recognise the disaster that Russia’s war effort was fast becoming. Even Hoare, whose local knowledge was so much more superficial, could see the problems of social injustice and failing morale that had been intensifying since the war began. And even Hoare heard the stories of dark forces around the imperial household, misguiding them in the direction of defeat.

The Tsar and Tsarina believed ‘the people’ were fired with personal loyalty to them – naturally, for were not the Romanovs rulers by divine right? The Tsar believed so, and this self-righteousness was at once his only strength and his greatest weakness. With Western Europe becoming increasingly secular, Russia – and the imperial couple in particular – clung to the medieval religious outlook of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its political expression was feudal. The Tsar, not by nature a tyrant, had been brought up to believe that the vast mass of his subjects were a resource, like his land and rivers and mines, to be used for the benefit of Russia. And as his wife said ‘The Tsar is Russia’. 16The peasants were out there like fish in the sea. If men were lost in war, there were always more men, and in the Tsar’s mind they so loved the monarchy and all it stood for that they would feel honoured to serve.

He persisted as far as he could in ignoring change. Perhaps change was easy to ignore because it had been so very slow. The serfs had been liberated in the nineteenth century. There had been some land reform. Soldiers and sailors had mutinied after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, and revolution had threatened to spread; in October of that year the Tsar had been forced to grant Russia a constitution in order to pre-empt it. A constitution meant an elected government, the bi-cameral Duma. That had been instituted over a decade ago. But there was no universal suffrage and ministers were appointed by the Tsar. To a great extent government still operated by petition and dispensation, like a tribal society in which petitioners must queue for days to ask favours of a potentate.

Rasputin understood the system. He was the arch-fixer, and when, from 1915 onwards, the Tsar was at the Stavka, far from the capital, it was Rasputin, in his stuffy apartment in Gorokhovaya Street, whom people would queue to see, and Rasputin who would listen, and scrawl a note to whoever could give them what they wanted.

That the Duma had been emasculated, and that the workers were discontented and always striking, that there was a new urban middle class they did not understand at all and that soldiers at the front were deserting in droves, did not shake the imperial couple in their belief that the Tsar knew best. The Tsar’s reaction to constructive criticism was not to listen or even to confront but to shut out challengers; to send them out of the room as would a vexed schoolmaster. Right-wing aristocrats would have had him do a lot worse, but he was temperamentally inclined to avoid confrontation.

Still worse, he was impressionable. Orders were issued and countermanded, ministers arrived and departed, with disconcerting frequency, as new arguments won him over.

His most obvious defect was his inability to form his own judgement; it was this trait which made his Generals contemptuous of him. 17

Back in 1905 only Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaivich, the most famous of Tsar Nicholas’s uncles, had been able to persuade him to sign the October Manifesto and grant a constitution. The Grand Duke was older, more belligerent, and a lot taller; he was six feet six, and his physical presence alone carried authority. And the soldiers respected him, so the Tsar had made him Supreme Commander of the Russian Armies at the start of hostilities in August 1914.

Russia had been bound by treaty to join France and Britain and its old enemy Japan (the Allies) in fighting the expansionist Germans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later, the Turks (the Central Powers). 18So the Tsar had had to go to war; a Romanov could not break his word. Unfortunately, Russia was unprepared for war in any respect other than manpower. They began with a massive 102 regular land divisions (each of between 12,000 and 20,000 men), where the British began with six. At the very beginning Grand Duke Nikolai, with 1.6 million men at his disposal, sent several divisions to East Prussia, thus gallantly diverting German forces from France and Belgium. The German army was better supplied and vastly better prepared for war than the Russian rabble, and although Russia probably saved the British and French from an ignominious rout, the Russians were easily outmanoeuvred, and tens of thousands killed. This was the battle of Tannenberg, and a great deal of outmoded but useful matériel was gained from it by the Germans.

Before the end of 1914 Turkey had joined the Central Powers. So in 1915, besides trying to defend its western borders, Russia had to prevent Turkey from grabbing the oil fields of Azerbaijan or shoving Russia out of the way right across Central Asia and sneaking into British India. (Persia remained nominally neutral, but unfriendly.) At Grand Duke Nikolai’s request, the British and French deflected Turkish aggression by opening the Dardanelles campaign, which failed.

The Russians were beaten steadily backwards in the west. Morale sank as the German front advanced east along a line approaching Riga in the north, and south to Czernowitz on the border with Romania. Around 750,000 Russians were captured in the summer of 1915 alone. Lines of defence simply crumbled. In Petrograd, Stopford confided to his diary:

It will indeed be a tragedy if the enemy comes here, with all the factories and powderies and cannonries. At Riga there is sixty million pounds’ worth of timber, and more than double that value here. 19

At Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar wrung his hands and did nothing. He and his family were self-contained to the point of isolation. From the Tsarina, he received a constant chiding stream of advice, usually presented as the thoughts and insights of their spiritual advisor, Rasputin. Society, liberal and otherwise, was appalled. Rasputin helpfully offered to come to the Stavka to give Grand Duke Nikolai the benefit of his wisdom. He got a telegram by return.

Do come! I shall hang you.

It was never a good idea to offend Rasputin. Already the Tsarina could not invite her beloved advisor to the Alexander Palace, because her husband knew that Uncle Nikolai would find out about it and kick up a row; but this was the final straw. On 28 August 1915, Albert Stopford, dining with the usual clutch of Grand Dukes, heard that Nikolai Nikolaivich was likely to be relieved of his command. 20He informed Buchanan on 1 September.

On 5 September 1915 the news broke decisively: the Tsar in person was to take over as Supreme Commander. Grand Duchess Vladimir, rushing to her palace with this information, was late for dinner. (‘No Romanov is ever late for dinner,’ commented Stopford, appalled.) Forty minutes after her delayed arrival, suppressing his pique and ‘eating my lukewarm potage St-Germain ’ 21among an assortment of Romanovs, he found them dreadfully despondent. Unlike the Tsar, many of these nobles understood only too well the cost of military mistakes. They had seen the wrecked lives of the poor at first hand and they feared an uprising that might threaten the survival of the monarchy. They were aware of the hostile intelligentsia, whose criticisms they abhorred as inspired by alien ideas. Also, they could feel an icy blast from the German approach in the west, and they did not trust the soldiers, sailors or poorly fed people in the streets to cling to the Allied cause.