Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [45]
On the returning steamer, Nicholas Nikolaevich embraced Witte triumphantly: “Today, October 17th, is an important date. Exactly seventeen years ago, also on the 17th at Borki, God saved the dynasty. I think that now the dynasty is being saved from a no lesser danger.”
He was right. The 17th was an important date for their family.
October 17: the train wreck at Borki, when by a miracle Nicholas survived.
January 17: Nicholas appeared for the first time, so disastrously, before the Russian public.
October 17, 1905: The end of the autocracy. That day Nicholas signed a manifesto granting the first Russian constitution.
December 17: The death of Rasputin.
And 1917: The end of Nicholas’s empire.
In the early morning hours of July 17: His own death and that of his family.
All this time Nicholas remained calm and silent, as always. In his letters to his mother, though …
“Peterhof. 19 October, 1905.… It feels as though I have not written you for a year, so many difficult and unprecedented events have we experienced. You of course remember those days we spent together at Tsarskoe in January.… But they are nothing compared with now. The railway strikes that began around Moscow overtook all of Russia immediately thereafter. Petersburg and Moscow have been left cut off from the inner provinces.… The only contact with the city is by sea—which is quite convenient at this time of year! After the railways the strike spread to factories and plants, and then even to municipal institutions.… Imagine the shame! We have just had news of strikes, of policemen, Cossacks, and soldiers slain, of riots, disorders, and upheavals.… The gentlemen ministers have been arguing like wet hens … instead of acting decisively. There have been ‘meetings’—a fashionable new word—where armed insurrection was openly debated and approved, which I learned about immediately.… The use of arms was prescribed in the event of troops being attacked. Quiet, ominous days set in. It was like the feeling you sometimes get in the summer before a powerful storm. Everyone’s nerves were stretched beyond the limit. Of course, this situation could not last very long. During those terrible days I saw Witte constantly. Our conversations began in the morning and ended in the evening in full darkness. It seemed we could choose one of two paths: either appoint an energetic military man and do everything in our power to suppress the sedition. Or else present the population with civil rights, freedom of speech, press, assembly, and unions, and so on.… That would also entail an obligation to pass all kinds of legislation through the State Duma.… This is for all intents and purposes a constitution. Witte insisted heatedly on this path. And everyone I turned to answered me exactly as Witte had. The Manifesto was written by him and Alexei Obolensky. We discussed it for two days, and eventually I said a prayer and signed it.… Dear Mama, you cannot imagine how much I have suffered. My only comfort is that such is God’s will, and that this difficult decision will lead my dear Russia out of this unbearable, chaotic state in which it finds itself for nearly a year.”
Pierre Gilliard, the grand duchesses’ tutor, saw the empress on the day the manifesto was signed. She was sitting like a sleepwalker, staring at one point. Her world had fallen apart. Her son had been snatched in his cradle. He would not be the autocrat. She decided to fight.
In November the second capital rebelled. Barricades went up in Moscow. Trams were overturned. Nicholas felt the anger of a man deceived. He had given them a constitution, he had outdone himself. And in response, it all continued!
His troops pacified Moscow.
At Christmas Nicholas wrote his mother a letter, his usual tender letter, but there was already bloodshed in it. He was growing more and more inured to blood.
“22 December. Dear sweet Mama! All my prayers for you