Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [63]
On the return trip Nicholas stopped at Uncle Willy’s residence in Potsdam. The arrow of the Russian political compass had to stand exactly halfway between England and Germany.
In December 1910 Tolstoy died. On learning of Tolstoy’s death, Nicholas wrote that Tolstoy was a great artist and that God was his judge.
In February 1911 they celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the freeing of the serfs. Only fifty years before, people in his country had lived as slaves. There were celebrations in Kiev and the unveiling of a monument to Alexander II.
During these festivities in honor of the slain reformer another great reformer was killed: Stolypin. The minister was shot before Nicholas’s very own eyes. The mortally wounded Stolypin managed to make the sign of the cross over his tsar.
Thus his children witnessed murder for the first time. Once again the “police had failed to keep an eye out,” and again the assassin turned out to be a revolutionary enlisted as an agent of the Department of Police. The shadow of the omnipotent secret police?
An inquiry was made about this in the Duma on October 15: “It can be proven that in the last decade we have had a series of analogous murders of Russian officials that implicate the political police. They are everywhere setting up illegal publishing houses, bomb workshops, and terrorist acts.… [The political police] have become a weapon of internecine war between individuals and groups in governmental spheres.”
The tsar preferred not to think about these terrible surmises. He knew: life and death—everything was predetermined. Everything was God’s doing.
Evidently, Alix laid out these thoughts of his to Stolypin’s successor, Count Vladimir Kokovtsev: “There is no need to pity so much those who are gone. If someone is no longer among us, then that is because he has already played his role. Stolypin died to make way for you.”
The year 1913 began—the pinnacle of his empire’s flowering, the year of the great jubilee: his ancestors had ruled Russia for three hundred years, and Russian history was marked off by their names. God had willed that he greet the triumphal date in prosperity.
Prosperity? Yes, after Stolypin’s reforms an unprecedented upswing began. Europe watched in amazement as the giant picked itself up. The government of France sent to Russia the economist Edmond Terry, who in his book Russia in 1914 wrote: “None of the European peoples is achieving these kinds of results.… By mid-century Russia will dominate Europe.” There was an intellectual explosion going on in the country. The homeland of Tolstoy and Chekhov became a laboratory for the future art of the twentieth century: Malevich, Kandinsky, Chagall, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold.
All these joyous changes scared Nicholas, though. Until very recently, Moscow, the ancient capital, had been permeated with the smell of the past he so cherished. But now, right before his eyes, the garden city had vanished: factory stacks puffed, huge new buildings were threatening to become skyscrapers, money men now ruled in the capital of the Muscovite tsars. “Manchester has invaded the City of the Tsars,” as the Russian newspapers wrote in those days. Petersburg, too.
The greater his country’s prosperity, the lonelier he felt. Educated society amiably termed tsarist rule Asiatic and dreamed of uniting Russia and Europe. A troubled, worrisome future was upon them—and both Witte and Stolypin had created it. Could he love his own great ministers?
As before, he believed that all this was the intelligentsia’s error: the muzhik feared Europe. Distrust for the “mutes” (as foreigners had been called in Russia since way back when) and holy tsarist rule were in the people’s blood.