Needless to say, they had not. Doomed, they left things as they were.
When he spoke of the “serpent” Guchkov had in mind Rasputin, among others. Another of the heavy burdens he had inherited. But this was a situation as complex as it was dangerous. How could Guchkov, unpardonable as he believed his own treatment and that of the slighted Stolypin to be, reveal to the Russian people at large that the autocratic ruler of Russia himself was involved? He looked to the ministers for help. And found none. Then, in January 1912, an article exposing Rasputin as a member of the Khlyst sect appeared in Guchkov’s newspaper, Moscow Voice. The issue was, of course, confiscated, and the editor prosecuted. This gave the Octobrists the right to raise the matter in parliament. The question read:
How long will the Most Holy Synod remain a silent and inactive observer while the scoundrel Khlyst, sex maniac, and charlatan Grigori Rasputin enacts his tragicomedy? Why are the bishops and archpriests silent? Why are all the newspapers in Petersburg and Moscow instructed to print nothing about Rasputin?
Guchkov, speaking in support of the vengeful interpellation, said:
Things are not well with our state. All that our people holds sacred is under threat. The prelates say nothing, the state does nothing. In such circumstances it is the patriotic duty of the press and of the people’s representatives to express society’s indignation.
Subsequently, in the debate on the budget estimate for the Holy Synod, he said:
Never have I risen to speak from this platform with such a heavy heart. It takes a temperament different from mine, and a spiritual makeup foreign to me, to concentrate on the insurance of church property, the equalization of episcopal stipends, or even the preparatory steps toward the convocation of a provincial church council, when all these things are fading into insignificance and I feel like shouting aloud that the church is in danger and the same danger threatens the state. This fanatical sectarian, or rogue and vagabond, whichever he is, this figure so bizarre in the bright light of the twentieth century (voice from the left: “Electricity and steam!”), by what means has this man usurped such influence that the highest authorities of state and church bow down before him? (From the left: “You may kiss my hand!”) Just think who is master up above there, who turns the handle that brings about changes of policy and of personnel, the fall of some and the elevation of others. (Markov II: “Old wives’ tales!”) Behind Grigori Rasputin stands a gang, a whole motley crew, with some surprising members, who have purchased an interest in his personality and his magical tricks, marketing the holy man! They are his prompters, they tell him what whispers to pass on. It is a whole commercial enterprise, and it plays its game skillfully and subtly. Years of revolutionary and antiecclesiastical propaganda could not have done what Rasputin can achieve in a few days. The Social Democrat Gegechkori is right from his own point of view when he says that “Rasputin has his uses.” Indeed, for Gegechkori’s friends, the more of a “Rasputin,” the more debauched he is, the better. At this dreadful moment, with despair and dismay on one side and malicious glee on the other, where do we look for authority? In church or in state? And where were you, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, to be found? When we were discussing legislation to guarantee freedom of worship, the right to convert from one denomination to another, and on Old Believer communities, all this to correct an ancient wrong, we saw you among our opponents. But the ulcer gnawing at the core of the nation’s soul you have ignored completely!
I have often noticed that those who have obtained a large share of life’s blessings are least inclined to part with them. I know that we cannot always demand heroism. But there is an ethical minimum, obligatory for all who are invested with power. There are occasions when serving and timeserving are two different things. When civic heroism becomes an obligation. Under the years 1911–12 some future Russian chronicler will record that “while Vladimir Karlovich Sabler was High Procurator of the Holy Synod the Orthodox Church sank lower than ever before!”
It was after this speech that the Empress pronounced hanging too good for Guchkov. He was by now not just a political but a personal enemy of the imperial couple. And that was just how he saw it himself.
The more outspoken he became, the harsher he was and the less fastidious in his methods. Early in 1912 he disseminated hectographed copies of letters written by the Empress and the Grand Dukes to Rasputin and supplied by the monk Iliodor (some of them turned out to be forgeries). At about the same time Guchkov’s secret informant Polivanov, after reading some official letter to Sukhomlinov, reported to Guchkov his conclusion that there was a German spy in the ministry and close to the minister—one Myasoedov, to cap it all a former officer of gendarmes whose current assignment was to look out for political disaffection in the army. (There had been no such invigilation for quite some time, informants had been called off, and this was a recent and private venture on the part of the minister.) No more tempting combination of circumstances, no better target, could have been contrived. If the attack succeeded, the War Minister (whose post Guchkov most wanted to control) would be toppled, and his own man, Polivanov, appointed. He was not slow to strike, with sensational articles, in Suvorin’s two newspapers and in his own: “Espionage and Detection,” “Who is in charge of counterespionage in Russia?” and a reproduction of his own statement in the State Defense Council. There was no precedent in Russian history for such an accusation against the War Ministry! It was all the more effective because it invoked the antipathies of the public: a gendarme officer! political surveillance! espionage! See what they’re like! The public was duly perturbed and demanded that the War Ministry reveal its secrets. By now the rumor that Polivanov would replace Sukhomlinov was making the rounds. But Guchkov himself, under interrogation by the investigating magistrate, had nothing more substantial than rumor to offer, and Polivanov’s information proved valueless. (Guchkov refused to accept this to the end of his days.) Sukhomlinov himself, however, like the coward he was, was slow in countering the allegations. Then Lieutenant Colonel Myasoedov struck the newspaper proprietor Boris Suvorin in the face with a riding crop, in the stands at the racecourse, and challenged Guchkov to a duel. For that Guchkov was of course ever ready! They met with pistols on Krestovsky Island, and Guchkov appeared in the Duma later with a bandaged hand, to thunderous applause. (He had not fired at his opponent, but Myasoedov was forced to resign for disgraceful behavior.)
These speeches resounded throughout the country, and it sometimes looked as though the whole state was changing because of them.
In reality there was no change at all. The Supreme Power was still the same towering, insensate wall, and people despaired of finding any force to breach it and let it in light and fresh air. Had the Manifesto ever existed? Had it been left as a memorial to the Tsar’s panicky impulsiveness? Had the Octobrist Party itself ever existed? (Shcheglovitov, leader of the right, would shortly call it “the party of the lost charter.”) Presumably it had, since it constituted the stable center of the Third Duma. But in the elections to the Fourth Duma, in the autumn of 1912, the party suffered defeat, characteristically under attack from left and right. The left saw it as the party of landowners and the big bourgeoisie, the right as the party of “October Christ-sellers.” After the party’s defeat a great exertion of the imagination and the voice was required to maintain that it still existed. Once again, it fell to Guchkov to make most of the effort. He had suffered torment on the hustings: soliciting votes from the electorate was always humiliating, not at all like speaking in the Duma, where his position was secure. And after that he was rejected—a nationwide sensation!—by his very own Moscow, its favorite son, its idol no longer. The fickle public looked around for other candidates.
Neither right nor left could forgive him for his speeches and his middle-of-the-road policy. The most difficult line of all to follow in a developing political system.
Only yesterday you thought that your party, and you yourself, were Russia. And suddenly you find that you most certai
nly are not. You are cruelly wounded, but realization of what has happened is slow in coming. No man instantly understands the meaning of what has befallen him. But when change means success, means victory, we are quicker to appreciate it. It is more difficult to discern that life has taken a sharp turn downward from a high plateau, that there is nothing to be done, that if it drags on for another thirty years it will be downhill all the way.
Guchkov was only fifty when this defeat overtook him. Though disheartened, he neither understood nor accepted the verdict. He still believed in his powers—believed that he could, by himself, reverse his own fortunes and those of his party. He resorted to his well-tried method: went off to the war in the Balkans and remained there for a year. He spent the year thinking over what had happened, and in the end took it as a sign that he must change his strategy.
At the unveiling of the Stolypin memorial in Kiev in September 1913, Guchkov laid a wreath and silently bowed down to the ground. It would have been yet another surprise to the dead man to know how Guchkov interpreted loyalty to his murdered contemporary, fellow spirit, and rival. In November, unbroken and intransigent, Guchkov rounded up his disintegrating party and presented its conference, and the country, with a complete volte-face.
Our program, condemned by some in 1905 as too moderate and backward-looking, was a natural expression of the optimism of the age, a challenging call for reconciliation. It was a solemn pact between the historic regime and Russian society, a pledge of mutual loyalty. And Russian society would have had no excuse if at a moment of dreadful danger to the state it had refused to support the regime.
But the struggle in which a giant like Stolypin wore himself out proved far too much for his successors. For them the price of remaining in power is self-effacement. The Manifesto of 30 October has not been formally rescinded, but the regime’s creativity has dried up, there is no broad plan, no common will, there is complete paralysis. The goodwill of society toward the regime, the trust so carefully built up in Stolypin’s time, collapsed in a flash. The regime is incapable even of inspiring fear. Even the harm it does is often unreasoning, a reflex reaction. The government’s policy is leading us to inevitable dire catastrophe. But those who look forward to the enthronement of order on the ruins of the vanquished system will find themselves mistaken. I see no elements of stability in those destructive forces. Are we not in danger of lapsing into a period of prolonged anarchy, with the collapse of statehood? Are we not living through another Time of Troubles, but this time in a more dangerous international situation?
The attempt to reconcile state and society has not succeeded. It would now be an inexcusable mistake to prolong a pact which the regime itself has torn up.
Does history change direction while we stand still? Or is it really we ourselves who unconsciously make these abrupt turns, in desperation because we—of all people—are rejected? When some coherent form of words is found for it, it all looks logical enough. That for which Guchkov had condemned and detested the Kadets no more than six years earlier was, it seemed, now the right course for the Octobrists, though the system of government had not changed. The Octobrists were now bringing up the rear of the Kadets. The disoriented Guchkov was turning 180 degrees, and making a very good attempt to prove that not he but the circular walls of the carousel had turned.
At one time, in the days of national insanity, we Octobrists raised our voice against the excesses of radicalism. Now, in the days of governmental insanity, it is our duty to warn the regime. Faced with catastrophe, we must make one last attempt to bring the regime to its senses. Will our warning cry reach the heights on which the fate of Russia is decided? Can we infect the regime with our own excruciating anxiety? Can we rescue it from its somnambulistic state? They must not let themselves be lulled by superficial signs of calm. Never before were the revolutionary organizations so shattered and so enfeebled, yet never before was Russian society so profoundly revolutionized—by the actions of the regime itself.
That was the new twist Guchkov gave to the argument, but no one was there to be turned around except the Octobrists in the Duma, of which he himself was no longer a member. The right wing and the center of the old Octobrist Party had broken ranks. Only a score of left-wing Octobrists supported Guchkov, calling themselves “progressists.”
No one was asking to be converted. Russia was not for turning. And Guchkov himself spent most of his time in the Commission for the Reorganization of the Petersburg Water Supply.
Had he perhaps become overexcited and made such a silly fuss just because he himself had been thrown out?
Still at the height of his powers, he was denied any chance of using them; renowned throughout Russia, he was suddenly of no use to anyone. Observing the pusillanimity of Russian policy, abroad as well as at home, Guchkov despaired. “They” had failed to remain on friendly terms with Germany, which was what both countries needed, but failed also to confront that country effectively. There was one, and only one, possible argument in favor of the coming war—a breakthrough to Constantinople—but the Balkan countries, and especially Bulgaria, were precisely the ones that Russia had alienated and lost in those last prewar years. Guchkov arranged a meeting between a Bulgarian general and the Serbian minister in his Petersburg apartment, in an attempt to reconcile the two Balkan countries. For almost a hundred years Pan-Slavic policies had been a dead weight on Russian minds, even that of the otherworldly Dostoevsky. Who could expect Guchkov to free himself from it and realize that Russia’s welfare depended only on her internal and not her external development? Every age has its ceiling of comprehension, and Guchkov was no more capable than Milyukov, or than the whole Progressive Bloc, of renouncing the dream of Constantinople. As soon as the fatal shot was fired in Sarajevo, Guchkov, in a state of high excitement, and anxiety that Russia would not go to war, wrote to the Foreign Minister, Sazonov:
This, then, is the latest—but is it the last?—stage of humiliation to which we have inevitably descended thanks to the faintheartedness of the Emperor. I believed in you once, hoping to find at least some reflected glimmer of Stolypin’s great Russian soul. Now my hope is that the cup of the Russian people’s patience will run over, and they will shrug you off, each and every one of you.
(Ah yes, his wish would be realized! More fully than he could ever have expected!)
Guchkov’s reaction to the first day of the war was: “Now we’re for it! The bills are coming in!”
He was taking a cure at Essentuki when war broke out. He rushed off by the first army train. Heading for the front! But the only place open to him was in the Red Cross, of which he had remained a very helpful member all those years. He got as far as Soldau, where the clouds of disaster were gathering over the 2nd Army. He was with the 2nd Army (doomed by its number? doomed by the ill luck of those still serving in it? doomed more probably by the hopeless incompetence of General Yuri Danilov—"Black Danilov”) when he and it were once again almost completely surrounded near Lodz in November 1914. A narrow corridor had been kept open, and its fate was in the balance. But the route for evacuation of the wounded had been cut off earlier, and Guchkov decided to stay with them, to stand up for them when they fell into German hands and share their fate. When the corridor was nearly closed he sent Prince Volkonsky with a written request for aid:
The number of wounded has mounted to 12,000 and we have only the most meager resources to help them. We are extremely short of everything—personnel, dressings, fuel, bread. I am pretty tough, but even so this is hard to take. Today, 22 November, appears to be the critical day, and only a miracle can save our army. But the fate of the campaign, indeed the fate of Russia itself, is bound up with that of the army. And all this is the fault of the gang of scoundrels who have installed themselves up above.
The pincers, however, were prized open, and on this occasion the 2nd Army was saved. Guchkov wrote both to the government and to the Duma while he was still at the front, and arrived in Petrograd in person shortly afterward. He told his stor
y to each influential minister in turn. And came up against a brick wall. He succeeded in getting an interview with Voeykov, the Palace Commandant, urging him to “open the Emperor’s eyes” and tell him to dismiss Sukhomlinov at once—otherwise supplies to the army would cease altogether. (Whether he did, or, as seems more likely, did not, realize that disruption of supplies to the army was the common experience of all the warring countries, it was a good stick with which to beat Sukhomlinov.) But to no effect. Addressing a group of Duma deputies—Kadets, centrists, and right-wingers—he represented the situation as already hopeless. They all refused to believe him:
Guchkov was playing the fool again, courting notoriety as always. They were, all of them, still under the spell of the national unification in August, which was supposed to mean that Russia’s victory was assured.
Not until early 1915 did it dawn on Petrograd that things were going badly at the front. Then fate handsomely compensated Guchkov: others, not he himself, now accused Myasoedov of espionage, and he was promptly executed. Guchkov’s earlier efforts had not been in vain. His prestige was reinforced, and Sukhomlinov’s was terminally low. Galicia and Poland had to be surrendered for the government to become scared enough, for society to be sufficiently worked up, and for Sukhomlinov to be replaced at last by Polivanov.
Throughout the war Guchkov felt himself to be the man Russia most needed, preferably as Minister of War, but he remained an ineffectual busybody, an outsider, with no official standing—a Russian destiny! Becoming more and more convinced that the government would not budge, would not change its ways for the better, from the summer of 1915 on Guchkov successfully presided over the War Industry Committees, set up to supply the army with arms and munitions (correctly, it seems, assuming that it could outperform the government in this area). Polivanov, who enjoyed his confidence, was now War Minister, so that Guchkov could be sure of learning all the details firsthand, and exercising his influence from within the government. But now that he had the bit between his teeth, he was not going to trail behind the Kadets. On the contrary, he would outdo them in aggressiveness. And so, at conferences held in September 1915, after the dissolution of the Duma, he proposed that the dismissed deputies continue the fight by extraparliamentary methods! Once again, he was cruelly rebuffed and not even included in the deputation elected by those conferences. The Progressive Bloc, discreetly intent on self-preservation, settled down to await the next convocation of the Duma.
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