wherever His Majesty appeared. There is no doubt that in this strong attachment of the masses ... to the person of the Emperor lies the great strength of the Russian autocracy.'12
In fact, the jubilee took place in the midst of a profound social and political crisis — some would even say a revolutionary one. Its celebrations were set against a backdrop of several decades of growing violence, human suffering and repression, which had set the Tsar's people against his regime. None of the wounds of the 1905 Revolution had yet healed; and some of them had festered and become worse. The great peasant problem remained unresolved, despite belated efforts at land reform; and in fact, if anything, the landed gentry had become even more opposed to the idea of concessions to the peasants since the 1905 Revolution, when crowds had attacked their estates. There had also been a resurgence of industrial strikes, much more militant than their predecessors in the early 1900s, with the Bolsheviks steadily gaining ground at the expense of their more moderate rivals, the Mensheviks, among the labour organizations. And as for the aspirations of the liberals, which had seemed so near in 1905, they were now becoming a more distant prospect as the court and its supporters blocked all the Duma's liberal reforms and (with the Beiliss trial of 1913, which even after the Dreyfus Affair shocked the whole of Europe with its medieval persecution of an innocent Jew on trumped-up charges of the ritual murder of a Christian boy) trampled on their fragile ideal of civil rights. There was, in short, a widening gulf of mistrust not just between the court and society — a gulf epitomized by the Rasputin scandal — but also between the court and many of its own traditional supporters in the Civil Service, the Church and the army, as the Tsar resisted their own demands for reform. Just as the Romanovs were honouring themselves and flattering themselves with the fantastic belief that they might rule for another three centuries, outside their own narrow court circles there was a growing sense of impending crisis and catastrophe. This sense
of despair was best voiced by the poets of this so-called 'Silver Age' of Russian literature — Blok and Belyi above all — who depicted Russia as living on a volcano. In the words of Blok:
And over Russia I see a quiet Far-spreading fire consume all.
How are we to explain the dynasty's collapse? Collapse is certainly the right word to use. For the Romanov regime fell under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It was not overthrown. As in all modern revolutions, the first cracks appeared at the top. The revolution did not start with the labour movement — so long the preoccupation of left-wing historians in the West. Nor did it start with the breakaway of the nationalist movements on the periphery: as with the collapse of the Soviet Empire that was built on the ruins of the Romanovs', nationalist revolt was a consequence of the crisis in the centre rather than its cause. A more convincing case could be made for saying that it was all started by the peasant revolution on the land, which in some places began as early as 1902, three years before the 1905 Revolution, and indeed that it was bound to be in so far as Russia was overwhelmingly a peasant society. But while the peasant problem, like that of the workers and nationalities, introduced fundamental structural weaknesses into the social system of the old regime, it did not determine its politics; and it was with politics that the problem lay. There is no reason to suppose that the tsarist regime was doomed to collapse in the way that Marxist determinists once claimed from their narrow focus on its 'social contradictions'. It could have been saved by reform. But there is the rub. For Russia's last two tsars lacked the will for real reform. True, in 1905, when the Tsar was nearly toppled from his throne, he was forced reluctantly to concede reforms; but once that threat had passed he realigned himself with the supporters of reaction. This is the fatal weakness in the argument of those historians on the Right who paint a rosy image of the Tsarist Empire on the eve of the First World War. They claim that the tsarist system was being reformed, or 'modernized', along Western liberal lines. But the last two tsars and their more reactionary supporters — in the gentry, the Church and Rightist political circles — were at best ambiguous towards the idea of 'modernization'. They knew, for example, that they needed a modern industrial economy in order to compete with the Western powers; yet at the same time they were deeply hostile to the political demands and social transformations of the urban industrial order. Instead of embracing reform they adhered obstinately to their own archaic vision of autocracy. It was their tragedy that just as Russia was entering the twentieth century they were trying to return it to the seventeenth.
Here, then, were the roots of the revolution, in the growing conflict
between a society rapidly becoming more educated, more urban and more complex, and a fossilized autocracy that would not concede its political demands. That conflict first became acute (indeed revolutionary) following the famine of 1891, as the government floundered in the crisis and liberal society became politicized as it launched its own relief campaign; and it is there that the narrative of Part Two commences. But before that we must look more closely at the main protagonists of the conflict, starting with the Tsar.
Four years before the tercentenary the brilliant sculptor, Prince P. N. Trubetskoi, had completed an equestrian statue of the former Tsar Alexander III which stood in Znamenskaya Square opposite the Nikolaevsky Station in St Petersburg. It was such an ingenious and formidable representation of autocracy in human form that after the revolution the Bolsheviks decided to leave it in place as a fearful reminder of the old regime; and there it remained until the 1930s.* The huge bronze figure of Alexander sat rigidly astride a ponderous horse of massive architectural proportions, its four thick legs fixed like pillars to the ground. The rider and horse had been made to appear so heavy and solid that it seemed impossible for them to move. Many people took this to be a symbol of the autocracy's own inertia, and there was a perhaps not-altogether unintentional element of irony in this. Workers were quick to recognize the statue's funny side. They christened it the 'Hippopotamus' and recited the witty lines:
Here stands a chest of drawers,
On the chest a hippopotamus
And on the hippopotamus sits an idiot.
Even the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, President of the Academy of Arts and the late Tsar's brother, denounced the statue as a caricature. It was certainly a cruel twist of fate that Trubetskoi had chosen to build the statue in equestrian form, since Alexander III had always been afraid of horses. His difficulties with them had grown in his final years as he put on weight. It became almost impossible to find a horse that he could be persuaded to mount.13
Nicholas was oblivious to such ironies. For him, the Trubetskoi statue symbolized the power and solidity of the autocracy during his father's reign. He
* After more than fifty years in storage the statue was returned to the city's streets in 1994. Ironically, the horse now stands in front of the former Lenin Museum, where it has taken the place of the armoured car which, in April 1917, brought Lenin from the Finland Station.
ordered an even larger statue of Alexander to be built for Moscow, his favoured capital, in time for the tercentenary. It took two years to construct the awesome monument, which Nicholas himself unveiled amidst great ceremony during the jubilee celebrations. Unlike its Petersburg brother, which had combined a good representational likeness of the Tsar with a strong symbolic point, the new statue had no pretensions to artistic merit. The Tsar's giant figure was a mannequin without human expression, a monolithic incarnation of autocratic power. It sat straight-backed on its throne, hands on knees, encumbered with all the symbols of tsarist authority — the crown, the sceptre and orb, the imperial robe and full military dress — staring out towards the Kremlin, its back to the cathedral, in the manner of a pharaoh with nothing to think about except the source of his own illimitable power.14
Since Alexander's death, in 1894, Nicholas had developed an almost mystical reverence towards the memory of his father. He thought of him as the true autocrat. Alexander had ruled over Russia like a medieval lord over his
