After Easter 1913, the imperial family devoted a celebratory fortnight to retracing the route of the first Romanov, Mikhail Fyodorovich, in reverse, from Moscow through the heartland to the ancient Romanov patrimony of Kostroma, and back to a triumphal entrance to Moscow. The face of the Our Lady of St. Theodore icon in Kostroma, the Romanov dynasty’s patron icon, had become so badly blackened, the image was nearly invisible, a terrible omen.171 But Nicholas II, emboldened by the renewal of seventeenth-century roots, renewed his scheming to end the constitutional autocracy by canceling the Duma’s legislative rights, rendering it purely advisory “in accordance with Russian tradition.” He shrank, however, from attempting what he and so many conservatives desperately craved.172 Amid the cult of autocratism, moreover, disquiet spread among the monarchy’s staunchest advocates. Despite the pageantry, many people in Russia’s upper and lower orders alike had come to doubt Nicholas II’s fitness to rule. “There is autocracy but no autocrat,” General Alexander Kireev, the Russian courtier and pundit, had complained in a diary entry as early as 1902, a sentiment that over the years had only widened, like a rock-thrown ripple across the entire pond of the empire.173 An imperial court hofmeister observing the Romanov processional to the Kazan Cathedral concluded that “the group had a most tragic look.”174 The immense Russian empire was ultimately a family affair, and the family appeared doomed. It was not simply that Nicholas II, a traditionally conservative man of family, duty, and faith, was piously committed to the “autocratic idea” without the personal wherewithal to realize it in practice. Had the hereditary tsar been a capable ruler, the future of Russia’s dynasty still would have been in trouble.175
Because of a genetic mutation that the German princess Alexandra had inherited from her grandmother Britain’s Queen Victoria, the Russian tsarevich Alexei came into the world with hemophilia, an incurable disease that impaired the body’s ability to stop bleeding. The tsarevich’s illness remained a state secret. But secrecy could not alter the likelihood that Alexei would die at a relatively early age, perhaps before fathering children. Nor was there a way around the improbability that a boy walking on eggshells, subject to death from internal bleeding by bumping into furniture, could ever serve as a vigorous, let alone autocratic, ruler. Nicholas II and Alexandra remained in partial denial about the dynasty’s full danger. The hemophilia, an unlucky additional factor piled on the autocracy’s deep structural failures, was actually an opportunity to face the difficult choice that confronted autocratic Russia, but Nicholas II and Alexandra, fundamentally sentimental beings, had none of the hard-boiled realism necessary for accepting a transformation to a genuine constitutional monarchy in order to preserve the latter.176
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CONSTITUTIONAL AUTOCRACY was self-defeating. Nicholas II worked assiduously not just to stymie the realization of the parliament he had granted, but even to block the realization of a coordinated executive branch, as an infringement on autocracy. “Autocratic government” constituted an oxymoron, a collision of unconstrained sacral power with legal forms of administration, a struggle among functionaries to decide whether to heed the “will” of the autocrat or act within the laws and regulations.177 Blaming the failings of imperial Russia on “backwardness” and peasants, therefore, is misguided. Stolypin was undone primarily by the autocracy itself as well as by Russia’s uncomprehending elites. He wielded an arsenal of stratagems and possessed tremendous personal fortitude, but he met relentless resistance from the tsar, the court, and the rightist establishment, including from Sergei Witte, who now sat in the State Council.178 The establishment would not allow Stolypin to push through a full program of modernization to place Russia on the path of strength and prosperity in order to meet the array of geopolitical challenges. “I am certainly sorry for Stolypin’s death,” Pyotr Durnovó, another Stolypin nemesis in the State Council, remarked at a meeting of rightist politicians in 1911. “But at least now there is an end to the reforms.”179 True enough: reform died. At the same time, it was notable that Stolypin had not for the most part attempted to outflank the recalcitrant establishment by appealing directly to the masses, despite his eventual promotion of a broad Eastern Orthodox “nation.” Devoted to the monarchy, he sought to fuse divinely ordained autocratic power and legitimate authority, caprice and law, tradition and innovation, but he relied upon a deliberately antimass-politics Duma, aiming for a regime of country squires (like himself). In the emigration in 1928, a refugee forced to flee Russia would celebrate Stolypin as Russia’s Mussolini, the first “Eastern Orthodox fascist,” a national social leader.180 Not in the least. Stolypin’s contradictory five-year premiership lacked a radical ideology, and he remained a corridor politician even when he went out to address the people.
In international affairs, Stolypin had been unable to avoid a de facto posture of alignment with Britain against Germany. True, he did achieve an improbable and important policy victory at conservative expense, and despite lacking formal foreign affairs jurisdiction, by restraining Russian passions over the Balkans and elsewhere.181 That hard-won restraint, however, was destined not to last. Beginning just three years after Stolypin’s death, a world war would break out that, when combined with Russia’s alienated conservatives and the Romanov’s secret hemophilia, would sweep aside Russia’s constitutional autocracy and, in very short order, Russia’s constitutionalism entirely. Even then, a Russian fascism would not take hold.182 If anyone alive had been informed during the Romanov tercentenary celebrations of 1913 that soon a fascist right-wing dictatorship and a socialist left-wing dictatorship would assume power in different countries, would he or she have guessed that the hopelessly schismatic Russian Social Democrats dispersed across Siberia and Europe would be the ones to seize and hold power, and not the German Social Democrats, who in the 1912 elections had become the largest political party in the German parliament? Conversely, would anyone have predicted that Germany would eventually develop a successful anti-Semitic fascism rather than imperial Russia, the home of the world’s largest population of Jews and of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion?183
A focus not on leftist revolutionary activity but on geopolitics and domestic high politics reveals the central truth about imperial Russia: The tsarist regime found itself bereft of a firm political base to meet its international competition challenges. That circumstance made the regime more and more reliant on the political police, its one go-to instrument for every challenge. (Alexander Blok, the poet, who would study the files of the tsarist police after the revolution, deemed them Russia’s “only properly functioning institution,” marveling at their ability “to give a good characterization of the public moods.”)184 Indulgence of the police temptation did not result from any love of the okhranka or of police methods; on the contrary, the tsar and others roundly despised their ilk.185 Rather, the overreliance on the political police stemmed from an irreconcilable antagonism between the autocracy and the Constitutional Democrats, and from the tsarist system’s profound distaste for street mobilization on its behalf. In modern times, it was not enough to demobilize opponents; a regime had to mobilize proponents. A system deliberately limited to the narrow privileged strata, backed by police and a peasant army, was, in the modern age, no polity at all, certainly not for a would-be great power competing against the strongest states. A modern integrated polity needed more than gonfalons, processionals holding icons, polyphonic hymns (“Christ Is Risen”), and the retracing in 1913 of a pilgrimage to Moscow originally undertaken in the seventeenth century. Durnovó, in leading the rescue of the autocracy in 1905–6, had proved able to reset the political moment in Russia, but unable to alter the fundamental structures. Stolypin, equally ready to wield repression yet also far more creative politically, bumped up against tsarism’s political limits. Of all the failures of Russia’s autocracy with regard to modernity, none would be as great as its failure at authoritarian mass politics.