tsar’s absence leaves considerable power in the hands of the loathed tsarina – which also means those of Rasputin.
With Nicholas’s complicity, Alexandra begins what the ultra-right-wing deputy Vladimir Purishkevich calls ‘ministerial leapfrog’. The Romanovian method becomes one of appointing adventurer after incompetent after nonentity to grand offices of state. The liberals and the sharper-witted right grow ever more apoplectic.
As hatred for Rasputin grows in high society, respect for Nicholas plummets.
It is in this context that Milyukov makes a historic Duma intervention in the Tauride Palace. Breaching all rules of etiquette and discretion, he denigrates, by name, both the tsarina and Boris Stürmer, her latest appointee as prime minister, in a litany of governmental failure. Milyukov punctuates his speech with the repeated question: ‘Is this stupidity or is it treason?’
His words reverberate throughout Russia. He has said nothing that is not known, but he has said it.
It is news to no one by now that ‘the present order of things will have to disappear’. In January 1917, General Alexander Krymov, on leave from the front, meets with Duma deputies in the home of the colourful conservative politician Michael Rodzianko – an Octobrist, a committed monarchist but the implacable enemy of Rasputin – to discuss their discontent. The army, he tells them, would accept, even welcome, a regime change, the replacement of the tsar.
Nicholas receives word after desperate word that he must alter course to survive. The British ambassador transgresses protocol to warn him he is on the brink of ‘revolution and disaster’.
Nothing seems to stir behind those placid tsarry eyes.
By December 1916, a month before the dawn of the revolutionary year, various disgusted aristocratic conspiracies for national renewal are underway: on the 16th, one of them reaches fruition. With collaborators from the highest tiers of the court, including that redoubtable racist Purishkevich, one Prince Felix Yusupov entices Rasputin to visit his palace by the river, ostensibly to meet his wife. While ‘Yankee Doodle’ plays repeatedly on a gramophone, Rasputin lounges in his smartest clothes in a dim, arched room, eating the cyanide-laced chocolates and drinking the poisoned Madeira his host has provided.
The toxins have no discernible effect. The conspirators consult in frantic whispers. Yusupov is panicking. He comes back in to join his guest, and, as if seeking the most preposterous imaginable circumstance for murder, he invites Rasputin to examine an antique Italian crucifix, crafted in rock crystal and silver, that he has propped up on a commode. As Rasputin bends reverentially to look, crossing himself, Yusupov draws a pistol and shoots.
A legendarily protracted death scene plays out. Rasputin lurches upright, reaching out to grab at the terrified assassin. Yusupov scrambles away, yelling for his accomplice Purishkevich. When the two men return Rasputin has vanished. Mindless with agitation, they rush outside, and find him lurching through the thick snow in the Petersburg night, croaking Yusupov’s name.
‘I will tell the Empress!’ Rasputin gasps, staggering towards the street. Purishkevich seizes Yusupov’s weapon and fires several times. The towering figure sways and falls. Purishkevich runs through the snowdrifts to the prone and twitching man and kicks him in the head. Now Yusupov joins in, beating madly at the body with a truncheon, the snow muffling the thuds. Yusupov screams his own name, in echo of his victim’s dying fury.
Hearts hammering, they wrap Rasputin’s body in chains and drive him through the darkness to the Malaya Moika canal. They shuffle with their burden to the edge, and let the black water take him down.
But they miss one of his boots, and leave it on the bridge, where the police will find it. When, three days later, the authorities pull Rasputin’s contorted body out of the water, word spreads that the underside of the newly formed ice is scratched where, with the frenzied strength of the godly, Rasputin struggled to emerge.
People flock to the spot where the so-called mad monk died. They bottle the water, as if it were an elixir.
The tsarina is overcome with pious grief. The right are delighted, hoping Alexandra will now repair to an asylum, and that Nicholas will magically gain a resolve he has never had. But Rasputin, colourful as he was, was only ever a morbid symptom. His murder is not a palace coup. It is not a coup at all.
What will end the Russian regime is not the gruesome death of that pantomime figure too outlandish to be invented; nor is it the epochal tetchiness of Russian liberals; nor the outrage of monarchists at an inadequate monarch.
What will end it comes up from below.
The pitch-black early hours in the third year of war: a viciously cold winter. In Petrograd, as in countless Russian cities, people gathered in the streets before dawn, trying to keep warm, desperate for bread there was no certainty they would receive. Rationing was in place, but fuel shortages meant bakers could not meet demand even if they had the ingredients. The hungry waited for hours, forming lines that became inching, shuffling, mumbling mass meetings, crucibles for dissent. Very often their wait was in vain: crowds of the furious and famished then roamed the streets, hurling stones through shop windows, hammering on doors, looking for food.
People talked politics in Yiddish, Polish, Latvian, Finnish, German (still), and in many other languages as well as in Russian: this was a cosmopolitan city. Around its wealthy heart it was a city of workers, swollen by the war to around 400,000, an unusual proportion of them relatively educated. And it was a city of soldiers, of whom 160,000 were stationed there in reserve, their morale poor and getting worse.
In January, the tsar’s government had ordered General Sergei Khabalov, the commander of the military district, to suppress any disorder in Petrograd. He had readied 12,000 troops, police and Cossacks for this purpose. He had machine guns stationed at strategic locations, in case of riots. The agents of the Okhrana ramped up their spying, including within a demoralised left, many of its leaders in exile.
Repression notwithstanding, on 9 January, the twelfth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, 150,000 Petrograd workers came out and marched in what was, for many, the first strike since the revolt they commemorated. In a portent to which they did not pay adequate attention, police reported that watching soldiers cheered the workers’ red banners. After that day, Petrograd’s working class struck and struck again.
Every moment of political confrontation throws up its myths and kitsch. But it is not sentimentality to insist that the workers’ culture that had grown since 1905 was becoming stronger. Patchily, unevenly, these were strikes inflected by economic rage, by opposition to the war, and also, for an activist minority, by that striving for class honour.
Though most pronounced there, strikes were not restricted to the capital. More than 30,000 workers downed tools in Moscow, a less radical city than Petrograd, more dominated by the liberal middle classes, its working class more dispersed. The strikes continued, sporadic, into February, putting activists in constant danger of arrest. In Petrograd on 26 January, eleven labour representatives on the official Central War Industries Committee – created by industrialists in response to the government’s utter lack of coordination – were jailed for ‘revolutionary activity’.
Krupskaya and Lenin mouldered
