Your maternal heart long ago showed you what you can accomplish, and how you can show your gratitude to the people. You tried to save your son, the future tsar, from the worst kind of education for grand dukes, that is, a military education, surrounded by military discipline and German clientism. All Russia rejoiced upon hearing that you had summoned people with a higher civilian education. Many even thought that they would see your son on the benches of Moscow University, that Sevastopol of research and education, which religiously and at great sacrifice held its banner of truth and thought aloft during thirty years of persecution. And they would see him there without a group of general aides-de-camp, without an escort of both secret and regular police—as one sees the son of Queen Victoria in university halls. We blessed you from afar. But this could not have been pleasing to the Black Cabinet3—and what surprise can there be in that? Prior to this, weren't you acquainted with these people, who, like logs, hinder all progress, openness, court reform, and stand in the way of the liberation of the serfs? How could they look on with indifference as your son received a humane education? It was bad enough that La Harpe4 nearly spoiled Alexander I. But why did you so quickly change your mind and hesitate on the very first step? Why, in a matter of such importance, did you allow behind-the-scenes intrigue in the torture chambers of the Third Department to force out of your son's classroom people upon whom Rus- sia—and you yourself—looked with confidence, and allow in their place an undistinguished German pedant? 5 [. . .]
Let us see what von Grimm is like. I am leafing through his Wanderun- gen nad Sudosten.6 This is what he said in the dedication to Konstantin Niko- laevich: "But such delightful memories are clouded by the very sad thought that the great man, under whose patronage and blessing we traveled, is no more amongst us—that great emperor whom you call father, in whom Russia found its pride and glory, and whom a Europe engulfed in strife saw as an unshakable polestar." [. . .]
Your poor son! If he were someone else, we would not care about him; we are aware that most of our aristocratic children are educated very badly. But the fate of Russia is bound up with his education, and that is why we are distressed to hear that a man who could write these lines has been appointed to look after him. What if your son actually believes that Nicholas was the greatest man of the nineteenth century and wants to be like him?
Or perhaps state wisdom and an understanding of Rus will be instilled in him by Zinoviev?7 Where did he become a teacher and why is he more able than fifty. or even five hundred other battalion commanders and all sorts of generals who give orders in a hoarse voice and educate soldiers with a rod? We know of one virtue of his, a tender love for his brother, whom he removed as supervisor of an asylum and set up as a trustee of the Kharkov district, defending him against the right-wing students. But these family virtues, valued in Arcadia, are matched by crimes in government circles. Finally, even if Zinoviev were as educated as Zakrevsky, an orator like Panin, with a clear conscience like Rostovtsev, and chaste like Butkov,8 wouldn't it be possible to find instead the kind of people pushed aside by him and the intrigue of the Black Cabinet—who are Russian, educated, love their country, and do not wear epaulets?
Epaulets are a grand thing, and a military uniform, like a monk's cassock, cuts a person off from other people; neither a monk nor a soldier are our equal and that is why they are set off from us. Both are incomplete people, people in an exceptional position. One has his arms always folded like a corpse, while the other has them always raised like a fighter. Neither death nor murder constitute life's best moments.
The title of Russian tsar is not a military rank. It is time to give up the barbaric thought of conquests, bloody trophies, cities taken by storm, ruined villages, trampled harvests—what kind of daydreams are Nimrod and Attila? The time has passed for scourges of mankind like Charles XII and
Napoleon. All that Russia needs is based on peace and is possible in peacetime. Russia thirsts for internal changes, it needs new civil and economic development, and, even without war, the military hinders both these goals. Troops mean destruction, violence, and oppression, and they are founded on silent discipline; that is why a soldier is harmful to the civic order, because he makes no judgments, and the sense of responsibility that distinguishes a man from an animal has been taken away from him.
Teach your son to wear a suit and enroll him in the civil service and you will be doing him a great favor. Occupy his mind with something nobler than an endless game of soldiers; the classroom of the heir to the throne should not resemble a corps de garde. This is a peculiarity ofPrussian princes and other petty German princelings. The royal house of England seems to be no worse than others, so why does the Prince of Wales, instead of learning about the Horse Guards or the Royal Blues or the Coldstream Guards, sit with a microscope and study zoology?
With deep distress we hear stories of how a cadet is sent to the heir for them to play war in the halls of the Winter Palace. a game of Circassians and Russians. What shallowness, what poverty of interests, what monotony. and along with that, what moral harm! Did you ever think what that game means, what it represents. what is the reason for the rifle, bayonet, saber, why these bivouacs, for which the servant lights a spirit lamp on the floor instead of a campfire? This entire game represents the misfortune of battle, that is, wholesale killing and the triumph of brute strength. there's just one thing missing—blood up to the knees, the groans of the wounded, piles of corpses, and the savage cries of the victors. What kind of children's game is this, what kind of dress rehearsal for inhumanity or senseless behavior when it degenerates to the level of a corporal? [. . .]
Do not think that—carried away by sentimentalism—we wish to say that military science and military craft are useless for the heir to the throne. No! The sad necessity that in time of peace one must be ready to repel an enemy makes military organization necessary. In preparing to be head of state, the heir must know the military part of his responsibilities, but as one part; financial and civic questions, as well as judicial and social issues, have a greater right to be understood well by him.
Is it not sad to see the grand dukes learning the details of each regiment's uniform, all the secrets of handling a rifle, and how to command a platoon and a battalion, but not about civilian work, or the limits of various powers, or the economic state of the various parts of Russia, and they remain alien to Russian literature and those contemporary questions that shake the world and make the entire human race tremble. Ask any one of them and you will see whether or not we are correct. But why even ask?
Look at how barren their lives are, how useless is their wandering about for Russia. one travels to a stud farm, a second to look at the walls of some citadel, and the third to see the fifth or the fifteenth division.
It is terrible to think how hackneyed and empty our grand dukes' existence has become. A man lived and died in our midst; he may have been endowed by nature with a good heart, but his entire life was spent in unnecessary busyness and aimless bustle. What distinction did Mikhail Pav- lovich9 add to a life spent close to the throne? That he was head of artillery in the Russian army?