A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  As Rasputin's power grew so did the legends of his crimes and misdemeanours. There were damaging stories of his sexual advances, some of them unwanted, including rape. Even the Tsar's sister, Olga Alexandrovna, was rumoured to have found herself the victim of his wandering hands. There were the drunken orgies, the days spent in bath-houses with prostitutes, and the nights spent carousing in resraurants and brothels. The most famous scandal took place at the Yar, a well-known gipsy restaurant, in March 1915. Rasputin had gone there with two journalists and three prostitutes. He became drunk, tried to grab the gypsy girls, and began to boast loudly of his sexual exploits with the Empress. 'See this belt?' he bellowed. 'It's her majesty's own work, I can make her do anything. Yes, I Grishka Rasputin. I could make the old girl dance like this if I wished' — and he made a gesture of the sexual act. By now, everyone was looking at Rasputin and several people asked if he really was the famous holy man. Rasputin dropped his pants and waved his penis at the spectators. The British agent, Bruce Lockhart, who was in the restaurant downstairs, heard 'wild shrieks of women, broken glass and banging doors'. The waiters rushed about, the police were called, but no one dared evict the holy man. Telephone calls to increasingly high officials finally reached the Chief of

  the Corps of Gendarmes, who ordered Rasputin's arrest. He was led away and imprisoned for the night. But the next morning orders came down from the Tsar for his release.34

  What made these rumours so damaging politically was the widespread belief, which Rasputin himself encouraged, that he was the Tsarina's lover. There were even rumours of the Empress and Rasputin engaging in wild orgies with the Tsar and Anna Vyrubova, her lady-in-waiting, who was said to be a lesbian. Similar pornographic tales about Marie Antoinette and the 'impotent Louis' circulated on the eve of the French Revolution. There was no evidence for any of these rumours. True, there was the infamous letter from the Empress to Rasputin, leaked to the press in 1912, in which she had written: 'I kiss your hands and lay my head upon your blessed shoulders. I feel so joyful then. Then all I want is to sleep, sleep for ever on your shoulder, in your embrace.'35 But, given virtually everything else we know of the Empress, it would be a travesty to read this as a love letter. She was a loyal and devoted wife and mother who had turned to Rasputin in spiritual distress. In any case, she was probably too narrow-minded to take a lover.

  Nevertheless, it was the fact that the rumours existed, rather than their truth, which caused such alarm to the Tsar's supporters. They tried to convince him of Rasputin's evil influence and to get him expelled from the court. But, although Nicholas knew of his misdemeanours, he would not remove Rasputin so long as the Empress continued to believe that he, and only he, could help their dying son. Rasputin's calming effect on the Empress was too much appreciated by her henpecked husband, who once let slip in an unguarded moment: 'Better one Rasputin than ten fits of hysterics every day.' The Archimandrite Theophan, who had helped to bring Rasputin to St Petersburg, found himself expelled from the capital in 1910 after he tried to acquaint the Empress with the scandalous nature of her Holy Man's behaviour. The monk Iliodor and Bishop Hermogen were imprisoned in remote monasteries in 1911, after confronting Rasputin with a long chronicle of his misdeeds and calling on him to repent. It was Iliodor, in revenge, who then leaked to the press the Empress's letters to Rasputin. The Tsar stopped the press printing any more stories about Rasputin, in spite of the pledge he had given in the wake of the 1905 Revolution to abolish preliminary censorship. This effectively silenced the Church, coming as it did with the appointment of Vladimir Sabler, a close ally of Rasputin's, as Procurator-General of the Holy Synod.36

  Politicians were no more successful in their efforts to bring Rasputin down. They presented evidence of his sins to the Tsar, but Nicholas again refused to act. Why was he so tolerant of Rasputin? The answer surely lies in his belief that Rasputin was a simple man, a peasant, from 'the people', and that God had sent him to save the Romanov dynasty. Rasputin confirmed his

  prejudices and flattered his fantasies of a popular autocracy. He was a symbol of the Tsar's belief in the Byzantine trinity — God, Tsar, and People — which he thought would help him to recast the regime in the mould of seventeenth-century Muscovy. 'He is just a good, religious, simple-minded Russian,' Nicholas once said to one of his courtiers. 'When I am in trouble or plagued by doubts, I like to have a talk with him and invariably feel at peace with myself afterwards.' Rasputin consciously played on this fantasy by addressing his royal patrons in the folksy terms batiushka-Tsar and matiushka-Tsarina ('Father-Tsar' and 'Mother-Tsarina') instead of 'Your Imperial Majesty'. Nicholas believed that only simple people — people who were untainted by their connections with the political factions of St Petersburg — were capable of telling him the truth and of giving him disinterested advice. For nearly twenty years he received direct reports from Anatoly Klopov, a clerk in the Ministry of Finance. Rasputin fitted into the same category. As the embodiment of Nicholas's ideal of the loyal Russian people, he could do no wrong. Nicholas discounted the rumours about him on the grounds that anyone shown such favour at court, especially a simple peasant like Rasputin, was bound to attract jealous criticisms. Moreover, he clearly considered Rasputin a family matter and looked upon such criticisms as an infringement of his private patrimony. When the Prime Minister, Stolypin, for example, gave him a dossier of secret police reports on Rasputin's indiscretions, the Tsar made it clear that he regarded this unsolicited warning as a grave breach of etiquette: 'I know, Petr Arkadevich, that you are sincerely devoted to me. Perhaps everything you say is true. But I ask you never again to speak to me about Rasputin. There is in any case nothing I can do.' The President of the Duma got no further when he presented an even more damaging dossier based on the materials of Iliodor and the Holy Synod. Nicholas, though clearly disturbed by the evidence, told Rodzianko: 'Rasputin is a simple peasant who can relieve the sufferings of my son by a strange power. The Tsarina's reliance upon him is a matter for the family, and I will allow no one to meddle in my affairs.'37 It seems that the Tsar, in his obstinate adherence to the principles of autocracy, considered any questioning of his judgement an act of disloyalty.

  And so the Rasputin affair went unresolved. More and more it poisoned the monarchy's relations with society and its traditional pillars of support in the court, the bureaucracy, the Church and the army. The episode has often been compared to the Diamond Necklace Affair, a similar scandal that irreparably damaged the reputation of Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution, and that is about the sum of it. By the time of Rasputin's eventual murder, in December 1916, the Romanov dynasty was on the verge of collapse.

  2 Unstable Pillars i Bureaucrats and Dressing-Gowns

  On the first morning of 1883 the readers of Government News (Pravitel'stvennyi vestnik) opened their newspaper to learn that A. A. Polovtsov had been appointed Imperial Secretary. It was hardly the sort of announcement to make anyone choke on their breakfast. At the age of fifty-one, Polovtsov had all the right credentials for this top Civil Service job. The son of a noble landowner, he had married the heiress to a banking fortune, graduated from the elite School of Law, and steadily risen through the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy. He was, by all accounts, refined, cultured and well mannered; Witte even diought him a little vain. Polovtsov was confident and perfectly at ease in the aristocratic circles of St Petersburg, counting several grand dukes among his closest friends. He even belonged to the Imperial Yacht Club, the after-hours headquarters of Russia's ruling elite, where on New Year's Eve he had been told of his promotion.1 In short, Alexander Alexandrovich was a model representative of that small and privileged tribe who administered the affairs of the imperial state.

  The Russian imperial bureaucracy was an elite caste set above the rest of society. In this sense it was not unlike the Communist bureaucracy that was to succeed it. The tsarist system was based upon a strict social hierarchy. At its apex was the court; below that, its pillars of support in the civil
and military service, and the Church, made up by the members of the first two estates; and at the bottom of the social order, the peasantry. There was a close link between the autocracy and this rigid pyramid of social estates (nobles, clergy, merchantry and peasants), which were ranked in accordance with their service to the state. It was a fixed social hierarchy with each estate demarcated by specific legal rights and duties. Nicholas compared it with the patrimonial system. 'I conceive of Russia as a landed estate,' he declared in 1902, 'of which the proprietor is the Tsar, the administrator is the nobility, and the workers are the peasantry.' He could not have chosen a more archaic metaphor for society at the turn of the twentieth century.

  Despite the rapid progress of commerce and industry during the last decades of the nineteenth century, Russia's ruling elite still came predominantly from the old landed aristocracy. Noblemen accounted for 71 per cent of the

  top four Civil Service ranks (i.e. above the rank of civil councillor) in the census of 1897. True, the doors of the Civil Service were being opened to the sons of commoners, so long as they had a university degree or a high-school diploma with honours. True, too, the gap was growing, both in terms of social background and in terms of ethos, between the service nobles and the farming gentry. Many of the service nobles had sold their estates, moving permanently into the city, or indeed had never owned land, having been ennobled for their service to the state. In other words, the Civil Service was becoming just as much a path to nobility as nobility was to the Civil Service. It also had its own elite values, which only the crudest Marxist would seek to portray as synonymous with the 'class interests' of the landed nobles. Nevertheless, the aphorism of the writer Iurii Samarin, that 'the bureaucrat is just a nobleman in uniform, and the nobleman just a bureaucrat in a dressing-gown', remained generally true in 1900. Russia was still an old agrarian kingdom and its ruling elite was still dominated by the richest landowning families. These were the Stroganovs, the Dolgorukovs, the Sheremetevs, the Obolenskys, the Volkonskys, and so on, powerful dynasties which had stood near the summit of the Muscovite state during its great territorial expansion between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries and had been rewarded with lavish endowments of fertile land, mainly in the south of Russia and the Ukraine.2 Dependence on the state for their wealth, and indeed for most of their employment, had prevented the Russian aristocracy from developing into an independent landowning class counter-balancing the monarchy in the way that thev had done in most of Europe since the sixteenth century.

  As readers of Gogol will know, the imperial Civil Service was obsessed by rank and hierarchy. An elaborate set of rules, spelled out in 869 paragraphs of Volume I of the Code of Laws, distinguished between fourteen different Civil Service ranks, each with its own appropriate uniform and title (all of them translations from the German). Polovtsov, for example, on his appointment as Imperial Secretary, received the dark-blue ribbon and the silver star of the Order of the White Eagle. Like all Civil Servants in the top two ranks, he was to be addressed as 'Your High Excellency'; those in ranks 3 and 4 were to be addressed as 'Your Excellency'; and so on down the scale, with those in the bottom ranks (9 to 14) addressed simply as 'Your Honour'. The cbinovnik, or Civil Servant, was acutely aware of these status symbols. The progression from white to black trousers, the switch from a red to a blue ribbon, or the simple addition of a stripe, were ritual events of immense significance in his well-ordered life. Promotion was determined by the Table of Ranks established in 1722 by Peter the Great. An official could hold only those posts at or below his own personal rank. In 1856 standard intervals were set for promotion: one rank every three years from ranks 14 to 8; and one every four years from ranks 8 to 5. The top four ranks, which brought with them a hereditary title, were appointed directly by the Tsar. This

  meant that, barring some heinous sin, even the most average bureaucrat could expect to rise automatically with age, becoming, say, a civil councillor by the age of sixty-five. The system encouraged the sort of time-serving mediocrity which writers like Gogol portrayed as the essence of officialdom in nineteenth-century Russia. By the end of the century, however, this system of automatic advancement was falling into disuse as merit became more important than age.3

  Still, the top ranks in St Petersburg were dominated by a very small elite of noble families. This was a tiny political world in which everyone knew each other. All the people who mattered lived in the fashionable residential streets around the Nevsky and the Liteiny Prospekts. They were closely connected through marriage and friendship. Most of them patronized the same elite schools (the Corps des Pages, the School of Guards Sub-Ensigns and Cavalry Junkers, the Alexander Lycee and the School of Law) and their sons joined the same elite regiments (the Chevaliers Gardes, the Horse Guards, the Emperors Own Life Guard Hussar Regiment and the Preobrazhensky), from which they could be certain of a fast lane to the top of the civil or military service. Social connections were essential in this world, as Polovtsov's diary reveals, for much of the real business of politics was done at balls and banquets, in private salons and drawing-rooms, in the restaurant of the Evropeiskaya Hotel and the bar of the Imperial Yacht Club. This was an exclusive world but not a stuffy one. The St Petersburg aristocracy was far too cosmopolitan to be really snobbish. 'Petersburg was not Vienna,' as Dominic Lieven reminds us in his magisterial study of the Russian ruling elite, and there was always a place in its aristocratic circles for charmers and eccentrics. Take, for example, Prince Alexei Lobanov-Rostovsky, one of Nicholas II's better foreign ministers, an octogenarian grand seigneur, collector of Hebrew books and French mistresses, who 'sparkled in salons' and 'attended church in his dressing-gown'; or Prince M. I. Khilkov, a 'scion of one of Russia's oldest aristocratic families', who worked for a number of years as an engine driver in South America and as a shipwright in Liverpool before becoming Russia's Minister of Communications.4

  Despite its talents, the bureaucracy never really became an effective tool in the hands of the autocracy. There were three main reasons for this. First, its dependence on the nobility became a source of weakness as the noble estate fell into decline during the later nineteenth century. There was an increasing shortfall in expertise (especially in the industrial field) to meet the demands of the modern state. The gap might have been bridged by recruiting Civil Servants from the new industrial middle classes. But the ruling elite was far too committed to its own archaic vision of the tsarist order, in which the gentry had pride of place, and feared the democratic threat posed by these new classes. Second, the apparatus was too poorly financed (it was very difficult to collect enough taxes in such a vast and poor peasant country) so that the ministries, and still more

  local government, never really had the resources they needed either to control or reform society. Finally, there were too many overlapping jurisdictions and divisions between the different ministries. This was a result of the way the state had developed, with each ministry growing as a separate, almost ad hoc, extension of the autocrat's own powers. The agencies of government were never properly systematized, nor their work co-ordinated, arguably because it was in the Tsar's best interests to keep them weak and dependent upon him. Each Tsar would patronize a different set of agencies in a given policy field, often simply bypassing those set up by his predecessors. The result was bureaucratic chaos and confusion. Each ministry was left to develop on its own without a cabinet-like body to coordinate the work between them. The two major ministries (Finance and Interior) recruited people through their own clienteles in the elite families and schools. They competed with each other for resources, for control of policy and for influence over lesser ministries and local government. There was no clear distinction between the functions of the different agencies, nor between the status of different laws — nakaz, ukaz, ustav, zakon, polozhenie, ulozhenie, gramota and manifest, to name just a few — so that the Tsar's personal intervention was constantly required to unhook these knots of competing jurisdiction and legislation. From the perspectiv
e of the individual, the effect of this confusion was to make the regime appear arbitrary: it was never clear where the real power lay, whether one law would be overridden by special regulations from the Tsar, or whether the police would respect the law at all. Some complacent philosophers argued on this basis that there was in fact no real autocracy. 'There is an autocracy of policeman and land captains, of governors, department heads, and ministers,' wrote Prince Sergei Trubetskoi in 1900. 'But a unitary tsarist autocracy, in the proper sense of the word, does not and cannot exist.' To the less privileged it was this arbitrariness (what the Russians cursed as proizvol) that made the regime's power feel so oppressive. There were no clear principles or regulations which enabled the individual to challenge authority or the state.5