Trimmed up with women and with wine.
We only want to know, next day
What Ministers will be on view,
Or who takes who to see the play,
Or who at Cuba’s sat next who: …
And does Rasputin still prevail
Or do we need another saint,
And is Kshesinskaya quite well,
And how the feast at Shubin’s went:
If the Grand Duke took Dina home,
What kind of luck MacDiddie had —
Oh, if a Zeppelin would come.
And smash the whole of Petrograd.54
Much of the public hysteria was focused on the court, where a pro-German clique around the Tsarina was widely believed to be conspiring to bring about Russia’s defeat. The idea of treason in high places, which started with the Miasoyedov affair and the Great Retreat, gained momentum in 1916 as rumours spread of the existence of a ‘Black Bloc’ at court, which was said to be seeking a separate peace with Berlin. The growing domination of the Tsarina (the ‘German woman’), the anti-war sentiments of Rasputin, the large number of German names at the court, and the Tsar’s promotion of Stürmer to the status of a virtual ‘dictator’ (by June he had assumed the powers of Prime Minister, Minister of the Interior, Foreign Minister and Supreme Minister for State Defence) all helped to fuel speculation. It was widely claimed that the Tsarina and Rasputin were working for the Germans; that they had a direct line to Berlin; and that Nicholas regularly warned his uncle, the Kaiser Wilhelm, of the movements of his troops. Such rumours became even more distorted by the time they reached the Front. Judging from their letters home, demoralized soldiers were prepared to believe that Stürmer had been paid by the Germans to starve the peasants to death; and that Count Fredericks, the Minister of the Imperial Court, had agreed to sell the western half of Russia to the enemy.
Similar credence was given to rumours of various sexual scandals surrounding the Tsarina. Alexandra’s ‘sexual corruption’ became a kind of metaphor for the diseased condition of the tsarist regime. She was said to be a slut, the mistress of Rasputin and the lesbian lover of Anna Vyrubova, her lady-in-waiting, who was said to share her bed with Rasputin and the Tsar. None of these rumours had any basis in fact. Vyrubova was a naive and dim-witted spinster, infatuated with the mystical powers of Rasputin and the cosy domestic lifestyle of the imperial family. In 1917 she was medically certified to be a virgin by a special commission appointed by the Provisional Government to examine the charges against her. As for the Tsarina, she was much too strait-laced to indulge in any sexual act that was not strictly necessary for the reproduction of the dynasty. Nor was there any foundation to the charges of treason against her, although it is possible that German agents picked up information from Rasputin’s loud and boastful talk. He regularly dined at the house of a Petrograd banker whom the French Ambassador believed to be the leading German agent in Russia.
The point of these rumours was not their truth or untruth, but their power to mobilize an angry public against the dynasty. In a revolutionary crisis it is perceptions and beliefs that count rather than realities. The demonization of the Romanov court enabled its opponents to point the finger of blame at conspicuous culprits for the people’s wartime hardships. Condemning the court as ‘German’ was a way of defining and legitimizing this revolutionary anger as the patriotic mood of ‘the nation’, as if all the country’s problems were due to the evil influence of a few highly placed foreigners and could be solved by getting rid of them. The February Revolution of 1917 was identified as a patriotic revolution. Anti-German and anti-monarchist attitudes were closely interwoven in the new democratic consciousness which February’s leaders sought to cultivate as the basis for Russia’s national renewal. In this sense the anti-German riots of June 1915, at the height of the Great Retreat, were the first sign of an upswing in the popular revolutionary mood. Angry Moscow mobs burned and looted German shops and offices. Piano stores were attacked and Bechsteins and Blüthners hurled from the windows. Anyone suspected of being German (which often meant no more than being well dressed) was attacked and robbed. In Red Square crowds shouted insults at the ‘German woman’ and called for her to be shut up in a convent. There were also calls for the Tsar to abdicate in favour of the Grand Duke Nikolai. The hysterical public was determined to see German sabotage in everything, from the shortage of shells to the corruption of minor officials, and by raising the battlecry of ‘treason in high places’ the new pretenders to power became popular national heroes.55
It was difficult for the liberals, despite their fear of the masses, to resist this opportunity for political gain. By speaking for ‘the nation’ against the dynasty they might place themselves once again at the head of the opposition movement. This seemed increasingly important now that the protests against the war and its economic hardships were taking a more radical form, with mass strikes and demonstrations, many of them led by the socialists. ‘I am afraid’, one Kadet leader told his colleagues in the autumn of 1916, ‘that the policy of the government will lead to a situation in which the Duma will be powerless to do anything for the pacification of the masses.’ The reports of the secret police made it clear that ‘the broad mass of the people’ were becoming increasingly hostile to the Duma and were accusing it ‘of deliberately refusing to come to the aid of the masses; the most bitter accusations in this respect are levelled not only at the Octobrists, but at the Kadets too’. If the Duma was to avoid becoming obsolete and ineffective, it would have to move closer to the mood of the streets and add its own voice to the revolutionary movement. That was the view of the left Kadets, of Kerensky’s Trudoviks, and of a growing number of public figures, including Prince Lvov, who told a meeting of the Progressive Bloc that Russia’s only hope of salvation lay in a revolution. ‘Abandon all further attempts at constructive collaboration with the present government,’ he wrote in December; ‘they are all doomed to failure and are only an impediment to our aim. Do not indulge in illusion; turn away from ghosts. There is no longer a government we can recognize.’56
Such arguments were strengthened by the continued intransigence of the regime. The appointment in September of A.D. Protopopov as acting Minister of the Interior had raised the hopes of the moderate liberals, men like Miliukov, who still sought to win reforms from the government through conciliation. Protopopov was an Octobrist landowner and textile manufacturer, a member of the Progressive Bloc, and Deputy Chairman of the Duma. His appointment was widely seen as government capitulation to the liberal opposition — one soon to be followed by the appointment of a Duma ministry. But in fact it was no more than a clever political manæuvre by the court. The Duma was due to convene on 1 November and Protopopov, as a ‘Duma man’, was seen as the best man to control it. ‘Please take Protopopov as Minister of the Interior,’ the Tsarina had urged her husband. ‘As he is one of the Duma it will make a great effect and shut their mouths.’ Protopopov was a fanatical mystic (he once told Kerensky that he ruled with the help of Jesus Christ) and, unknown to the liberals, a protégé of Rasputin (who, as he once told Brusilov, was ‘saving Russia from a revolution’). He was ambitious and ridiculously vain — he was clearly overwhelmed by the honour bestowed on him by the Tsar — and was thus unlikely to endanger his own position by making common cause with the opposition. When the real nature of his role became clear — he soon donned the uniform of the Imperial Gendarmerie, an archetypal symbol of tsarist oppression — an old Duma colleague begged him to resign. Protopopov replied: ‘How can you ask me to resign? All my life it was my dream to be a Vice-Governor, and here I am a Minister.’57
Disillusionment with the new minister set in very quickly. Hope gave way to hatred in Duma circles. Protopopov’s obsequiousness to the imperial couple was nauseating. Instead of providing a bridge between the liberal opposition and the government he turned himself into a lackey of the court and was roundly condemned as a traitor to the parliamentary cause. On Rasputin’s request, he ordered Sukhomlinov’s release from prison — most of the country would have had him hanged for treason — and banned public organizations from meeting without the police in attendance.