It was not hard, by this stage, to convince the Tsar that he should reassert his autocratic authority. That, after all, had probably been his main objective in assuming the supreme command. As he saw it, none of his concessions to the liberal opposition had stemmed the public criticisms of his government, in fact they had only grown louder, and it was time to stop any further erosion of his authority. He deemed it intolerable that at this critical moment for the Empire, when the firm hand of autocracy was needed more than ever, his ministers should think fit to ask him to renounce his personal rule. On 2 September he ordered the dissolution of the Duma and reconfirmed his confidence in the government of his old and faithful servant, Goremykin. When the Premier returned to Petrograd and announced this decision to the Council of Ministers there was uproar. ‘Il est fou, ce vieillard,’ Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, was heard to say.36
There followed a two-day general strike in Petrograd against the Duma’s closure. But otherwise the opposition’s response was muted. Lvov was elected to lead a delegation of the public organizations to plead with the Tsar to ‘place the heavy burden of power upon the shoulders of men made strong by the nation’s confidence’. But Nicholas refused to receive them. They were summoned instead to the Ministry of the Interior where they were told that their ‘intrusion into state politics’ had been presumptuous. The Tsar had made up his mind to rule as an autocrat should, and no counsel, however wise or loyal, could make him change his mind. On 16 September the ministers were summoned to Mogilev for a final dressing down. ‘Show your fist,’ the Tsarina had urged her weak-willed husband. ‘You are the Autocrat and they dare not forget it.’ She even implored him to comb his hair with Rasputin’s comb in order to strengthen his will.37 The magic must have worked. For the ministers, having come determined to argue their case for reform, lost their nerve when confronted by the Tsar. The ‘revolt of the ministers’ was over and the monarchy’s final chance to save itself by political means had now been thrown away.
The dissolution of the Duma highlighted the liberals’ impotence. Power lay firmly with the Romanov court and, even with ten of the highest government officials on their side, there was nothing, short of revolution, the liberals could do to prevent the Tsar from taking power into his own hands. The Kadet politician, V. A. Maklakov, summed up the liberals’ dilemma in a widely quoted article in September. He compared Russia to an automobile being driven down a steep and dangerous hill at uncontrollable speed by a mad chauffeur (Nicholas). Among the passengers there are one’s mother (Russia) plus competent drivers, who recognize that they are being driven to inevitable doom. But no one dares grab the steering wheel for fear of causing a fatal accident. The chauffeur knows this and mocks the helplessness and anxiety of the passengers: ‘You will not dare touch me,’ he tells them. And, indeed, in these terrible circumstances, Maklakov concluded:
you will not dare touch him, for even if you might risk your own life, you are travelling with your mother, and you will not dare endanger your life for fear that she too might be killed. So you will leave the steering wheel in the hands of the chauffeur. Moreover, you will try not to hinder him — you will even help him with advice, warning and assistance. And you will be right, for this is what has to be done.38
The liberals’ paralysis was determined, above all, by their fear of sparking violence on the streets. They were caught between the devil of autocracy and the deep red sea of a social revolution that would undoubtedly drown them too. Miliukov was afraid that if the Duma went into open conflict with the regime and encouraged a popular revolt, as some on the left of his party advocated, it would lead to an ‘orgy of the mob’.39 Pushkin’s nightmare of the ‘Russian riot, senseless and without mercy’ would finally come to pass. Rather than risk this, the liberals played a waiting game: if they could hold out until an Allied victory, new channels for reform would open up. It was not the most dignified stance (a ‘revolt on their knees’ is how Stalin described it) but, short of moving to the barricades, there was little more that they could do. Essentially, it marked a return to the position of 1906, when the failure of the Vyborg Manifesto to rally the masses in the defence of the Duma had left the liberals high and dry, with nothing more to cling to than the hope of persuading the regime to liberalize itself. Ten years later, with the lessons of Vyborg behind them, they were even more frightened of the masses, who now were hardly more likely — at the height of the war with all its hardships — to limit themselves to the narrow political revolution envisaged by the liberals.
Encouraged by the success of his own show of strength, Nicholas followed it up with a series of further measures to roll back the liberal challenge to his autocracy. The promised Duma session in November, granted to appease the critics of its prorogation in September, was postponed indefinitely. The status of the War Industries Committees was gradually downgraded as the government returned to its old alliance with the big business interests of Petrograd. And, one by one, the main rebel ministers were dismissed. Samarin, the new Procurator of the Holy Synod and a prominent critic of Rasputin, was the first to be forced out, much to the fury of the Church and conservative opinion. Krivoshein, the Agriculture Minister, followed soon after. Next Shcherbatov, the Interior Minister, was replaced by Khvostov, an ally of Rasputin’s, distinguished only by the huge size of his belly, who immediately pledged to silence all public criticism of the government. He stepped up police surveillance of the Duma politicians, banned meetings of public organizations, tightened censorship and lavished government funds on the Black Hundred groups, which blamed the Jews for the army’s defeats and all the ills of war.
In all these personnel changes the Tsarina’s hand was at work. With the Tsar at the Front, she now became the real autocrat (in so far as there was one) in Petrograd. ‘Lovy,’ she wrote to her husband, ‘I am your wall in the rear. I am here, don’t laugh at silly old wify, but she has “trousers” on unseen.’ The main telephone in the Winter Palace was in her drawing-room, where she sat at her writing desk before a portrait of Marie Antoinette. She liked to boast that she was the first woman in Russia to receive government ministers since Catherine the Great, and in these delusions she was encouraged by Rasputin, who effectively used her as a mouthpiece for his own pretensions to power. Her letters to Nicholas were filled with advice from ‘Our Friend’, as she liked to call the ‘holy’ peasant. ‘It’s not my wisdom’, she would write, ‘but a certain instinct given by God beyond myself so as to be your help.’ Or: ‘We, who have been taught to look at all from another side see what the struggle here really is and means — you showing your mastery, proving yourself the Autocrat without which Russia cannot exist.’ It seems there was almost no matter of state beyond Rasputin’s expertise. She would write to the Tsar with his recommendations on food supply, transport, finance and land reform, although she herself admitted that such things made her own head spin. She even tried to persuade her husband to base his military strategy on what Rasputin had ‘seen in the night’, although here Nicholas put his foot down.40
Most of the Tsarina’s ink was used on recommendations for appointments. She saw the world in terms of friends and enemies of the ‘hidden cause’ waged by Rasputin and herself. Ministers, commanders of the armed forces and members of the court all rose or fell in her favour according to where they stood in relation to the ‘cause’. The patronage of Rasputin was the quickest way up the greasy pole — and criticism of him the quickest way down. In the seventeen months of the ‘Tsarina’s rule’, from September 1915 to February 1917, Russia had four Prime Ministers, five Ministers of the Interior, three Foreign Ministers, three War Ministers, three Ministers of Transport and four Ministers of Agriculture. This ‘ministerial leapfrog’, as it came to be known, not only removed competent men from power, but also disorganized the work of government since no one remained long enough in office to master their responsibilities. Bureaucratic anarchy developed with competing chains of authority: some ministers would defer to the Tsarina or Rasputin, while others remained loyal to the Tsar, or at least to what they thought the Tsar was, although when it came to the crunch he never seemed to know what he stood for and in any case never really dared to oppose his wife. Boris Stürmer, the longest-lasting Prime Minister of the ‘Tsarina’s rule’, who replaced the senile Goremykin in January 1916, was best known as a provincial governor who had been accused of venality, and as an Assistant Minister of Interior who had been charged with incompetence. In Sazonov’s memorable phrase, he was ‘a man who had left behind a bad memory wherever he had occupied an administrative post’. The affairs of state proved utterly beyond him. He ran to the Tsarina and Rasputin so often for advice that even the extreme monarchist V. M. Purishkevich began to compare this ridiculous figure to Chichikov in Gogol’s Dead Souls, who, after calling on all the dignitaries of the provincial town, sat for a long time in his carriage wondering who to visit next.41