To humor her, Nicholas usually followed his wife’s advice, but not slavishly; on rare occasion he could even oppose her wishes. They were a very loving couple, completely devoted to one another and usually of one mind. Both despised “public opinion,” which they identified with St. Petersburg society and the intelligentsia and viewed as an artificial “wall [sredostenie] erected to separate from them the adoring people.”* It has been said that when Nicholas used the word “intelligentsia” he made the same face as when pronouncing the word “syphilis.” He thought it should be erased from the Russian dictionary.18
Given the misfortune that dogged Nicholas in all his endeavors, it caused no great surprise that it also afflicted his domestic life. His wife bore four daughters in succession but there was no male heir. In desperation, she turned to charlatans, one of whom, a French physician by the name of Dr. Philippe, assured her that she was pregnant with a boy. Alexandra expanded in bulk until a medical examination in the ninth month revealed she had had a sympathetic pregnancy.19 When in 1904 a boy was finally born, he turned out to suffer from hemophilia, an incurable disease of which she had been the transmitter. The blow deepened Alexandra’s mysticism, but also her determination to see the child, christened Alexis, resplendent on the throne as Tsar of All the Russias.
The courtiers surrounding Nicholas II reinforced these preferences for anachronistic political practices. At the Tsar’s Court immense stress was laid on decorum and the observance of ritualistic forms:
The circle of intimates [of the Imperial family] consisted of dull-witted, ignorant remnants of dvoriane clans, lackeys of the aristocracy, who had lost the freedom of opinion and conviction, as well as the traditional notions of estate honor and pride. All these Voeikovs, Nilovs, Mosolovs, Apraksins, Fedoseevs, Volkovs—colorless, untalented slaves—stood at the entrances and exits of the Imperial Palace and protected the integrity of autocratic power. This honorary duty they shared with the Fredericks, Benckendorffs, Korfs, Grotens, Grünwalds—pompous, smug [Baltic] Germans who had sunk firm roots at the Russian Court and wielded a peculiar kind of influence behind the stage. The highly placed lackeys were united by a profound contempt for the Russian people. Many of them did not know Russia’s past, living in a kind of dumb ignorance of the needs of the present and indifference for the future. For the majority of them, conservative thought meant simply mental inertia and immobility. For people of this ilk, autocracy had lost sense as a political system, because their mental level was incapable of rising to general ideas. Their life flowed from one episode to another, from decorations to shifts on the ladder of ranks and honors. From time to time, the flow of events for them was interrupted by some shock—an uprising, a revolutionary upheaval, or a terrorist attempt. These portentous symptoms spread among them fear, even alarm, but never aroused their deep interest or attracted their serious attention. In the final analysis, everything reduced itself to hopes placed on a new energetic administrator or skillful police chief.20
The monarchy governed Russia with the assistance of five institutions: the civil service, the security police, the gentry, the army, and the Orthodox Church.
The bureaucracy (chinovnichestvo) descended from the household staff of medieval princes, originally slaves, and it retained into the twentieth century strong traces of its origin. It continued to act, first and foremost, as the personal staff of the monarch rather than as the civil service of the nation. Its members had little sense of the state (gosudarstvo) as an entity separate from and superior to the monarch (gosudar’) and his bureaucracy.21
On being admitted into the service, a Russian official swore loyalty, not to the state or the nation, but to the person of the ruler. He served entirely at the pleasure of the monarch and his own immediate superiors. Bureaucratic executives had the authority to dismiss subordinates without being required to furnish reasons and without giving the officials concerned the opportunity to defend themselves. The Service Regulations denied a discharged official all means of redress:
Officials who, in the opinion of their superiors, are incapable of carrying out their obligations, or who, for whatever reason, are [deemed] unreliable [neblagonadëzhnye], or who have committed a misdemeanor their superior is aware of but which cannot be factually proven, may be discharged from the service by qualified superiors at the latters’ discretion.… Officials who have been simply dismissed from the service at the discretion of their superiors without being informed of the reasons cannot lodge a complaint against such action. Their petitions for reinstatement in their previous posts or for a court trial not only must be left without action but must not even be accepted by the Governing Senate of His Imperial Majesty’s Chancery.…*
As if to emphasize that civil servants were descended from bonded domestics, an official, no matter how prominent, could not resign from the service without permission. As late as 1916, ministers, most of whom by then were at odds with the Tsar’s policies, had to request his permission to quit, which in a number of cases he refused to grant—a situation difficult for a European even to imagine.
Except for judges and certain categories of specialists, Russian officials were not required to furnish proof of educational qualifications. Unlike contemporary Western Europe, where appointment to the civil service called for either a school diploma or the passing of an examination, or both, in Russia admission requirements were perfunctory. To qualify for the post of Chancery Servitor (Kantseliarskii sluzhitel’), the stepping-stone to the lowest rung on the service career ladder, a candidate had only to demonstrate the ability to read and write grammatically and to have mastered the rudiments of mathematics. For advancement to the next higher rank, he had to pass an examination that tested for knowledge expected of a graduate of a grammar school. Once established in the lowest civil service rank, an official or chinovnik was not obliged to demonstrate any further competence, and moved up the career ladder in accord with the rules of seniority and the recommendations of his superior. Thus, Imperial officials were appointed and advanced on the basis of undefined criteria which in practice centered on complete loyalty to the dynasty, blind obedience in the execution of orders, and unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.
As personal servants of the Tsar, officials of the Imperial civil service stood above the law. A chinovnik could be indicted and put on trial only with the permission of his superior.22 Lacking such authorization, the judiciary was powerless to indict officials. Permission to try officials was rarely forthcoming, and this for two reasons. Since all appointments were made, at any rate in theory, by the Tsar, the failure of a bureaucrat properly to perform his duties reflected adversely on the Tsar’s judgment. Second, there was always the risk that if he were allowed to defend himself in court, the accused official could implicate his superiors. In practice, therefore, guilty officials were quietly transferred to another post or, if sufficiently distinguished, promoted to impressive but meaningless positions in the Senate or Council of State.23 In such matters the Tsar himself had to bow to custom. Following a train accident in which he almost lost his life, Alexander III wanted to bring to trial the Minister of Transport. He was ultimately dissuaded on the grounds that a public trial of a minister who had held his post for fourteen years would mean that he had “undeservedly enjoyed the confidence of the monarch”24—that is, that the Tsar had shown poor judgment. In the eyes of some contemporaries, the unaccountability of the Russian officialdom to the law or any body external to itself represented the principal difference between the Russian and Western European civil services. In fact, it was only one of many manifestations of the patrimonial spirit still embedded in the Russian state.