PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE next afternoon, August 2, 1914, the Tsar issued a formal proclamation of hostilities at the Winter Palace. It was a blazing-hot midsummer day. The palace square, one of the largest in Europe, was packed with thousands of sweltering, excited people carrying banners, flags and icons and waiting impatiently for the moment when they could pour out their emotion in the presence of the sovereign himself. On the Neva side, where the Tsar would arrive by boat from Peterhof, crowds of people swarmed along the bridges and quays, singing and cheering. The river itself was teeming with yachts, steamers, sailboats, fishing smacks and rowboats, all streaming flags and crowded with spectators.
When Nicholas and Alexandra stepped onto the quay at the Palace Bridge, wave on wave of cheers rolled over them: “
Inside the palace, the Tsar and the Empress slowly made their way through the crush of people lining the grand staircases and wide corridors. As Nicholas passed, bowing and nodding, men and women dropped to their knees and frantically tried to kiss his hand. The service was held in the great white marble Salle de Nicholas, where five thousand people had jammed themselves beneath the glittering chandeliers. An altar had been erected in the center of the hall, and on it stood the miraculous icon, the Vladimir Mother of God. The icon, brought to Moscow in 1395, was said to have turned back Tamerlane. Before the icon in 1812 the grizzled General Kutuzov had prayed as he was leaving to take command of Tsar Alexander I’s armies in the war against Napoleon. Now, at the beginning of a new war, Nicholas II invoked the icon’s blessing. Raising his right hand, he pronounced in a low voice the oath taken by Alexander I in 1812: “I solemnly swear that I will never make peace so long as a single enemy remains on Russian soil.”
After taking the oath, Nicholas and Alexandra went to meet the expectant masses waiting outside. When the two small figures appeared alone on a red-draped balcony high above them, the great crowd knelt. Nicholas raised his hand and tried to speak; the front rows hushed, but at the rear the excitement and commotion were too great and his words were drowned. Overwhelmed, Nicholas bowed his head. Seeing him, the crowd spontaneously began to sing the Imperial anthem whose chords make up the final crescendo of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”:
Hand in hand, the man in the khaki uniform and the woman in the white dress stood on the balcony and wept with the crowd. “To those thousands on their knees,” declared Paleologue, “at that moment the Tsar was really the Autocrat, the military, political and religious director of his people, the absolute master of their bodies and souls.”
It was the same throughout the empire: wild excitement, crowds filling the streets, laughing, weeping, singing, cheering, kissing. Overnight, a wave of patriotism swept over Russia. In Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, Kazan, Tula, Rostov, Tiflis, Tomsk and Irkutsk, workmen exchanged their red flags of revolution for the icons of Holy Russia and portraits of the Tsar. Students rushed from the universities to enlist. Army officers, caught in the street, were happily tossed in the air.
In St. Petersburg, every day brought new demonstrations in favor of the Tsar and Russia’s allies. From his window in the French Embassy, Paleologue looked down on huge processions carrying flags and icons, shouting “
At the German Embassy, an immense granite building surmounted on the roof by two huge bronze horses, the violent mob predicted by Count Pourtales made a sudden vengeful appearance. Their rage was directed not at their own government, as Pourtales had promised, but at his. Invading the building, they smashed windows, ripped tapestries and pictures and hurled into the street not only the Embassy furniture, china and glassware, but the Count’s own priceless collection of Renaissance marbles and brasses. Ropes were coiled around the equestrian statues on the roof, hundreds of hands pulled and tugged, and with a crash the Kaiser’s prancing horses toppled into the street.
In those early days, patriotism was closely tied to a deep-rooted fear of the Germans. “For Faith, Tsar and Country!” and “For the defense of Holy Russia!” were the calls that stirred the barracks, factories and villages. “The war with Japan,” wrote Kerensky, was “dynastic and colonial,” but “in 1914 the people immediately recognized the conflict with Germany as its own war … a war which meant that the destinies of Russia were at stake.” Rodzianko, walking in the streets of Petersburg, mingled with workers who a few days earlier had been chopping down telegraph poles, overturning streetcars and building barricades. “Now all Russia is involved,” they told him. “We
