Publicly the British and Germans were getting on better than they had in years. Over the next eighteen months Bethmann-Hollweg kept a guiding hand on foreign affairs, and the new German ambassador in London, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky, turned out—to everyone’s surprise—to be a gregarious Anglophile with a passion for British society. He got on well with Edward Grey and was soon robustly telling the German Foreign Office, just like his predecessor, that the British would never agree to neutrality in a European war. In early 1913 the latest German foreign minister, Gottlieb von Jagow, told the Reichstag that he was delighted by the “tender plants”32 of cooperation with England. The two countries had begun to negotiate on who might buy Portugal’s African colonies and how the long-planned Baghdad railway might come through British-controlled Persia. But in the circles around Wilhelm the subject of war with Russia never seemed far below the surface.
The disconnect between the ceremonial public life of the monarchs and the realities of politics and economics was more than ever demonstrated by the plethora of dynastic celebrations that took place in 1913. In Germany Wilhelm celebrated twenty-five years as kaiser and King of Prussia, the hundredth anniversary of the Prussian victory over Napoleon at Leipzig, and the wedding of his only daughter, Victoria Louise. In St. Petersburg Nicholas celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. Crowds turned out to cheer them both. The official German press ran dutiful eulogies describing the kaiser as the cornerstone of the German nation. In Russia the imperial family embarked on a tour from St. Petersburg to Moscow. “Wherever we went,”33 Olga recalled, “we met with manifestations of loyalty bordering on wildness.” Nicky and Alix were convinced that the celebrations had established a new rapport between the imperial family and the people. “We need only34 show ourselves once, and at once their hearts are ours,” Alix told one of her ladies. “The Tsar’s35 closest friends at Court,” remembered his chief minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, “became persuaded that the Sovereign could do anything by relying on the unbounded love and utter loyalty of the people.” There was talk in right-wing circles of re-establishing the direct communion between the Russian people and the tsar against the depraved modernity of the Left and the trade unions, of closing down the Duma for good, and even of getting rid of the Council of Ministers. There were other reasons to be cheerful. The country had had astonishing industrial growth and manufacturing had hugely increased too. It was chasing Germany and America in production of steel and coal. So successful did it look, that the British worried that Russia might feel it no longer needed the Convention. And in Germany Bethmann-Hollweg and the army chief, Moltke, were both haunted by the thought that the future belonged to Russia, and that by the late teens of the century it would be so powerful Germany would be at its mercy.
On closer scrutiny, however, both sets of dynastic festivities offered a different lesson: that nations were divided, regimes were discredited, and citizenries were disappointed and angry. Although, as the Berliner Tageblatt observed, large numbers of the German people were still “monarchically inclined,” in Germany the celebrations pointed up stark divisions, and a jadedness with the kaiser. “Never in the history36 of the German people, the most monarchical people in its conviction and character, its customs and habit,” the solidly establishment Kreuzzeitung wrote during the celebrations in June 1913, “has the monarchical thought been so attacked, has the monarchy faced such a strong front of open and hidden opponents.” On the far Right and in the army Wilhelm was viewed with intense disappointment for failing to provide the strong leadership he had promised. In 1912, under a pseudonym, the head of the Pan-German League, Heinrich Class, had published Wenn Ich Kaiser Wäre (If I Were Kaiser) in which he had longingly described a “strong, able leader,”37 unafraid to shrink the franchise, pass anti-Jewish and anti-socialist legislation, and impose press censorship. A blizzard of books from the German Right was demanding wars, expansion and German hegemony in Europe. The South Germans, meanwhile, complained about the suffocating influence “of Prussia and its38 Junker class” and their sense of exclusion from the Reich. Even the Bürgertum, the stalwart Prussian middle classes, could see the kaiser’s public inadequacies, and the Berliner Tageblatt complained on their behalf of having “been treated as39 a quantité négligeable for twenty-five years;” now, the paper said, the Bürgertum “screams for reforms.” The Left had fought the 1912 election on demands for a republic and had won 35 percent of the vote, 110 seats, making it the largest faction in the Reichstag. The Catholic Centre Party, with which Wilhelm and his government had refused to deal, came second, with ninety-one seats. The vote looked very much like a referendum on Wilhelm’s rule, its extravagant spending, its inequitable tax system, its sanctioning of high food prices and its inability to tackle rising unemployment. As a result, Bethmann-Hollweg no longer had control of the Reichstag, and had been forced to run the country without it by decree, financing government with foreign loans. The Left’s triumph caused hysteria among the German political and industrial elite, and led to talk at court and in the army of coups to get rid of universal suffrage—discussions quashed by Bethmann-Hollweg. But it visited upon the chancellor, as well as the army, a sense of gloom and pessimism about the divisions in and the future of Germany, assailed as it seemed to be from both within and without.
In Russia the crowds had cheered the Romanov celebrations because a royal process was entertainment and a rare sight. But, as Chief Minister Kokovtsov wrote, “There was nothing40 in the feeling of the crowd but shallow curiosity.” It was not hard to see why. There had been hopes of amnesties, new initiatives to restore public confidence, even a sense that the occasion wasn’t simply about the Romanovs, but about the people too—but none was forthcoming. There were only the conventional manifestations of royal ritual: processions, gala dinners, religious services. The institutions around the tsar had treated the occasion with humourless stiffness. When commemorative cups and plates and stamps went on sale with the tsar and his family illustrated on them, the Ministry of the Imperial Court complained that it was not permitted for the tsar’s head to appear on “utilitarian objects,”41 and the Holy Synod protested that it was improper for the sovereign’s face to be stamped with a postmark. Even the aristocracy of St. Petersburg society seemed half-hearted about the occasion. When it gave a ball for the imperial couple, the atmosphere, Nicholas’s sisters observed, was “hollow”42 and “forced.”43
The reality was that Russia’s administration was more gridlocked than ever; its governance more brutal, its leadership more lost. Even its industrial gains had been made at enormous social cost. In the rest of Europe, working conditions had gradually been improving. Not in Russia. Nicholas was still locked away at Tsarskoe, worrying about his sick son, watching anxiously over his invalid wife, ever more estranged and alienated from everything around him save the tiny court, fretting about the state of his nation, but paralysed by indecision. He would toy with the idea of overturning the new political order, but instead just complained from the sidelines. He loathed the impudence of the Duma, which, no matter how the government manipulated the franchise, came back irrepressibly critical and determined to support representative government. He was no keener on his ministers. Having hailed Peter Stolypin as Russia’s saviour in 1906, by 1911 he had become profoundly suspicious of him. Stolypin, a pragmatic conservative, had realized he had to work with the zemstvos—the local councils Nicholas’s father had abhorred—and talk to the Duma. Just as he had with Witte, Nicholas gradually came to distrust and dislike him. It was widely rumoured the tsar was about to dismiss Stolypin when he was assassinated at the Kiev Opera House—in front of Nicholas and his two eldest daughters—in September 1911. There were whispers that he had been murdered by the Right, as the shooter turned out to be both a left-wing radical and a police informer, and had made no attempt to get at the tsar.
“I am sure44 Stolypin died to make room for you,” Alix told Stolypin’s successor Vladimir Kokovtsov, rather chillingly, “and this is al
l for the good of Russia.” But Kokovtsov also found the tsar quietly encouraging ministerial factions against him. Each time Nicholas did this, it disrupted and undermined government stability and effectiveness a little bit more. After sacking Kokovtsov in early 1914, he lectured his Council of Ministers on the need for unity. His need to feel in control overrode everything—even the effective governance of the country. “The Emperor is by45 no means stupid, talks well and to the point, and is fully aware of what he is doing,” one particularly clear-eyed British diplomat reported in 1916. “… He is obstinate and vindictive, and quite obsessed with the idea that the autocracy is his and his children’s by divine right.”
The stories that came out of Russia made the regime look increasingly nasty and indefensible. In 1912 tsarist soldiers shot dead 500 striking miners, and wounded hundreds of others at the Lena goldfields in Siberia. Conditions at the mine were horrendous: the men worked fifteen-to sixteen-hour days, with an accident rate of 700 per 1,000 workers. Food, brought in from outside, was often rotten or insufficient. The strikers had been demanding an eight-hour day, a 30 percent wage rise and the improvement of food supplies. Within days St. Petersburg was engulfed in a huge general strike. The recently elected fourth Duma demanded explanations. They were not impressed by the latest minister of the interior’s answer, “Thus it has been46 so it always will be.” Relations deteriorated so badly that by the summer of 1912 ministers and Duma were barely in communication. Then there was the ugliness of the Beiliss affair in 1913, in which a completely innocent Jewish clerk was put on trial for ritual child murder. The almost comically hopeless case against him had been trumped up with the government’s, and the tsar’s, full knowledge—in the expectation that grassroots anti-Semitism would rally loyal Russians to the government. Nicholas himself sent the judge a gold watch on the eve of the trial, in anticipation of a guilty verdict. All the time the strikes continued: between 1912 and 1914 there would be 9,000 of them, many organized by the militant Bolsheviks, until between January and July 1914 there were a million and a half workers on strike.
Then there was Rasputin, whose exploits were becoming the stuff of Grand Guignol. Alix had come gradually to trust and rely on him for advice beyond Alexis’s illness. She believed he’d been sent by God. She had drawn him into the heart of the family, allowing him to watch her daughters getting ready for bed—something which deeply shocked her mother and sisters-in-law—and referred to him in letters to Nicholas as “Our Friend.” In 1911 she had begun to ask for his advice about ministers she didn’t like, and told Nicholas he should comb his hair with Rasputin’s comb before making difficult decisions. Secure in the imperial couple’s favour, Rasputin exploited his position. The head of the imperial Chancellery, Mossolov, found himself besieged by Rasputin’s clients armed with notes from the starets demanding positions. Stolypin and Kokovtsov both fell foul of him. Kokovstov was said to have been sacked by Nicholas at least partly for failing to prevent stories about Rasputin from getting into the press—stories which circumvented the censorship laws because they didn’t mention the imperial family by name. Perhaps inevitably, from 1911 stories about him had begun to circulate beyond Tsarskoe Selo. By 1912 he was the subject of denunciatory speeches in the Duma, and by 1914 newspaper articles were spreading his fame across Russia. The stories demonstrated painfully how the previously closed world of the Russian court could no longer shut out the world, and at the same time paradoxically how isolated from, and ignorant of, the outside world the imperial family had become. Press coverage of Rasputin transformed him from a court favourite muttered over by the elite into a national, and then international, symbol of the ills and poisons of the system. Scandalous rumours began to proliferate about his appetite for sex, booze and creating chaos.
The most notorious incident would come in 1915, when he turned up drunk at the Yar, a famous Moscow restaurant once frequented by Pushkin, accompanied by two women, and started a brawl. He called a newspaper editor to witness the scene, and as his pièce de résistance, he took out his penis, laid it on the table, and said he could do what he liked with the “Old Girl”47—meaning the tsarina. No one dared remove him until the Ministry of the Interior was called for permission to arrest him. In the absence of other explanations about his influence within the imperial family, it was almost too easy to attribute it to their alarming credulity, or to some sinister sexual enthralment. The gossip in St. Petersburg had it that Rasputin slept with the tsarina and her friend Anna Vyrubova, and had raped all the tsar’s daughters—their defilement a kind of metaphor for the degradation of the regime itself. Nicholas and Alexandra were repeatedly warned about Rasputin by servants, officials, the police, Church figures and finally even by their family. They refused to listen. They had become practised at ignoring those who told them things they didn’t want to hear.
Even stable Britain seemed to be succumbing to a new level of public disaffection and violent disorder. Miners’ and railway workers’ strikes threatened to bring the country to a standstill over 1912 and 1913, and the suffragettes’ campaign to get the vote for women reached new levels of violence. Windows at Windsor Castle were broken in 1912, and then in 1913 Emily Davidson martyred herself at the Derby by throwing herself under George’s horse. George, who had no sympathy with either strikers or suffragettes, was repelled and shocked. He told Asquith he should pass a law against picketing. “The King is hostile48 to the bone to all who are working to lift the workmen out of the mire,” wrote Lloyd George, who talked the strikers back to work. “So is the Queen. They talk exactly as the late King and Kaiser talked to me … about the old railway strike. ‘What do they want striking? They are very well paid.’”
Just as in Russia and Germany, in Britain there was talk on the Right of taking radical action against the Left. When the Liberal government’s bill to grant Home Rule to Ireland came up in the Commons in May 1912, Andrew Bonar Law, the new leader of the Conservative Party (whose full name, the Conservative Unionists, denoted their commitment to maintaining the union with Ireland by all means) told George that with the power of the Lords gone, the king should use his veto to stop the bill, dismiss his Liberal ministers and choose new ones—Conservative ones. By British standards this was strong stuff: the monarch was supposed to be above politics; no monarch had dismissed a minister since 1830 and no monarch had used the royal veto since 1708. It had the whiff of a palace coup, and was wholly at odds with the spirit of parliamentary democracy. George refused to do it, but the request instantly released a torrent of self-pity. “Whatever I do49 I shall offend half the population … No Sovereign has ever been in such a position,” and the idea of the veto exercised an enduring fascination over him. In August 1913 he sent a 1,500-word letter to Asquith, quoting Bagehot and claiming the right to dismiss advisers and dissolve Parliament on his own—which the prime minister ignored. The king also hated the thought of Home Rule. It was actually no more than the self-government that Australia and Canada already enjoyed, but to the king and the Conservative Party it seemed the first step in the dissolution of the British empire, and so—not least because the British government resisted so long—it would prove. As the Home Rule bill worked its way through Parliament, George took to sending Asquith “neurotic” letters, and summoning him for interviews in which he would complain about “his own position,50 and the terrible cross-fire to wh. he conceives himself to be exposed.”
In May 1913, at the wedding of Wilhelm’s youngest child and only daughter, Victoria, the three emperors came together for only the second time in their lives since 1889. The wedding was the last of the big royal gatherings that had been supposed to create such harmony in Europe. It was billed as a happy resolution to the old dispute over Prussia’s swallowing up of the kingdom of Hanover in 1866: Victoria was marrying Prince Ernest August of Cumberland, son of Alexandra and Minny’s sister Thyra, and grandson of Queen Victoria’s cousin the King of Hanover. It was the last time all three would be together, the last time any of them met.
Even so, the occasion raised in the protagonists a whisper of the old hopes that royal meetings made a difference. The kaiser, as usual, fancied the event as a moment of personal diplomacy. Afterwards he reported to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, “It went off52 extremely pleasantly and favourably. King George V, the Emperor and I were agreed on an absolutely complete conformity regarding the affairs of the Balkan states … The King of England as well as the Tsar are in complete agreement with me and are firmly resolved to keep the unbridled Bulgarian desire for aggrandizement at the expense of Turkey and of other states strictly within bounds.” He decided that he and George had got on so well that he would arrange a return visit to Britain. He might even have a genuine shot at weakening the Entente.
The Three Emperors Page 48
