The Russian Album (15 page)

In one of Peggy Meadowcroft's pictures, Paul is standing beside a file of wounded soldiers convalescing in his sister Mika's hospital established in a wing of the house. He is wearing a tail coat, striped pants, wing collar and tie, with an astrakhan perched jauntily on the back of his head. He is standing at attention with his hands down the creases of his trousers. He is smiling. Beside him stand the soldiers, one on crutches, another with a bandaged arm, another with the white gauze of a dressing showing at the neck. They are not smiling.

At Bossibrod station after that Easter vacation of 1915, the great engine poured gushers of steam into the night, and the boys sat in the ministerial carriage, a cube of light in the Ukrainian darkness, and looked back at their grandmother waving them goodbye from that little station platform. They never saw her again.

As the train swept northwards towards Petrograd, there would have been ragged columns of swathed figures, visible at the edge of the lights from the carriages, carrying bundles, their feet wrapped in sacking against the cold, trudging away from the front. Other trains besides theirs, military trains bearing the detritus of swiftly evacuated army headquarters, would blast past them and at the windows monocled faces would scratch at the frost and stare at these passing processions of wraiths, these numb, exhausted people who were soon to be their judges.

When the family returned to Petrograd rumours were sweeping the city of German invasion armies landing on the Baltic coast. The ascendancy of Rasputin's clique at court made the impotence of Cabinet discussions more and more humiliating. In August 1915 the Tsar decided to take over personal command of the army from his uncle Grand Duke Nicholas. Paul was appalled. The decision meant that if there were further disasters at the front, the Tsar himself would be blamed and the autocracy itself would be in danger. Paul's friend the Agriculture Minister Krivoshein warned the Cabinet, which had not been advised or consulted about the Tsar's decision, that the country was ‘rolling down the hill not only towards a military but towards an internal catastrophe'. The secret Cabinet minutes of August 1915 record Paul as observing dryly that the army was ceasing to be an army, and in the rout had become ‘a people in arms'. The students at the universities, he reported, were joining the industrial demonstrations and disorders which had begun in Moscow and Petrograd. Hearing rumours of an invasion from the Baltic, he drew up contingency plans for the evacuation of libraries and schools in the capital itself.

At a Cabinet meeting at Tsarskoe Selo, Paul and seven other Cabinet ministers begged Nicholas II not to take command of the army. On their return to the capital, the dissident ministers, including Paul, signed a joint letter of resignation, warning the Tsar that his decision threatened Russia and the dynasty. The Tsar, unmoved, boarded his train for the front. A month later the Cabinet was ordered to appear at the headquarters where the Tsar appealed to them to work together. Goremikin, the Prime Minister, seconded the Tsar's appeal to them by ‘calling on them to work as the old Russian nobility had always worked – not because of fear, but for conscience sake'. Paul was outraged that their courage had been impugned. The meeting ended with the Tsar's curt dismissal of them. On the return journey by train to the capital, Paul and his colleagues sat in shaken silence.

Days later, Paul was received at Tsarskoe Selo by the Empress, dressed in a nurse's uniform. When she appealed to him to work with Goremikin, Paul replied that events had passed beyond saving by any one man. The army could no longer be trusted against the populace; the old regiments had fallen on the fields of Galicia, Poland and East Prussia. The only solution was a government ‘leaning on organized society' working in union with the ‘social forces of the country' to mobilize those who have ‘something to lose from disorder'. This meant a Cabinet that would enforce collective responsibility and seek support from the Duma for its measures. She could see as clearly as Paul that this would mean the end of the autocracy and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Her reply closed every door: ‘The Tsar cannot yield. He will only be asked to surrender something more. Where will it end? What power will be left the Tsar?'

Everywhere in Russia, she went on, the humble people had rallied to her husband, except in the Cabinet and among the discontented rabble of the cities. In the countryside the People, that holy abstraction, were behind their Tsar. The irony was that her views, which filled Paul with despair, were a parody of his own: the Tsar was separated from his people; he must draw closer to them. So when the Tsar decided to take command of the army, to make himself one with a people in arms, Paul found his liberal convictions impaled on the contradiction between his commitment to the personal autocracy of the Tsar and an essentially British ideal of constitutional government.

The Empress stood stiffly throughout their interview. After forty-five minutes she concluded tersely, ‘Doubtless you know what is done with a regiment when anything occurs between the commanders and its officers such as what has happened in the Cabinet. It is disbanded.'

‘It is what we are praying for,' was Paul's answer.

By the autumn of 1915, the losses at the front had been stemmed, and with the immediate crisis past, the Tsar no longer felt bound to conciliate public opinion with the inclusion of liberal figures like Krivoshein. Five of the other ministers who had opposed the Tsar's decision to take command of the army were sacked. The Empress had marked Paul down as a dangerous liberal, yet to everyone's surprise, he was one of three members of the Cabinet to be retained. He begged the Tsar to be relieved of his post. He was told that ‘the faithful defenders do not desert the trenches' and so he soldiered on at the Ministry of Education. By the autumn of 1915, he was the last Russian liberal at the heart of the regime.

The Tsar apparently kept him because he had a soft spot for old regimental companions. Perhaps too he responded to that mysticism of service in which the young minister continued to define his obligations to a dying regime. At his next audience with the Tsar Paul stated his personal credo:

‘I am neither a politician nor a bureaucrat. I am only a citizen, and as a citizen I look at the problems of life and seek to solve them from the point of view of the average man living in Russia and his interests, which properly understood do not differ at all from the interest of the state. Not only shall I always remain a citizen of Russia, but I shall stand firmly on the tradition of my family, which includes acceptance of the principle of the union between the Tsar and his people, transcending the partition wall created by bureaucratic interests.'

The Tsar in his wooden way remarked that he had often reiterated the same point of view. When Paul pleaded for the Tsar to name a ministry that would have the confidence of the progressive bloc of the Fourth Duma and the
zemstvo
movement, the Tsar replied with the duplicity of the weak, ‘You shall see.' The Tsar then replaced Goremikin with another nonentity whose only recommendation was the Tsarina's support. Paul tendered his resignation again but was ordered by the Tsar to remain ‘in the trenches at Tschernischeff Bridge', the site of the Ministry of Education.

Through the winter of 1916, Paul remained at his post, isolated, divided within himself, ever more exhausted by the struggle to run an education service in a regime staggering towards collapse. The Cabinet note-taker recorded that in moments of stress the Minister of Education would run his hands through his sparse remaining hair with a kind of convulsive motion. He said less and less in Cabinet. The meetings were a farce. He was bypassed by a kitchen Cabinet which took such decisions as there were still to take: they delayed the opening of Petrograd schools in the autumn of 1916 without even informing him; huge sums to bribe the press were slipped past the Cabinet, despite his personal protest to the Tsar. When he pleaded against the Cabinet decision to switch the control of provisioning from the Ministry of Agriculture to the Ministry of the Interior, he concluded his monthly audience with the Tsar with the words: ‘It needs only a spark to cause a terrible conflagration.' The Tsar, withdrawn inside a rigid calm, replied softly that everything seemed worse in Petrograd than it actually was. Both men now, Tsar and minister, were in hallucinatory stages of exhaustion. During audiences, the Emperor gazed out of the window, a look of mute Byzantine suffering already etched on his face, while his minister went through the motions of a report in a stumbling monotone. Through the year of 1916, Paul slowly came apart.

There are no pictures of him during this period. He had been swept out of the family frame altogether by the final convulsions of the regime. Peggy Meadowcroft's album is full of pictures of George, aged two and a half, in a white smock and button shoes, holding a tennis racquet or riding his tricycle in the garden of the family
dacha
in Tsarskoe Selo. There are pictures of the boys skiing in the woods and across the frozen lakes of the Tsarskoe Selo park. Everyone smiles easily: only the light – of autumn 1916 – is dark behind.

That autumn Natasha's sister, Sonia Wassiltchikoff, dashed off a note to the Empress – begging her to keep out of politics and to cease to listen to Rasputin. She thought, naively, that she could write informally, woman to woman. Punishment was swift: immediate banishment to their estate at Vybiti; dismissal of her husband from his ceremonial functions at court.

In October 1916, Natasha gave birth prematurely to a baby boy. They placed him in an incubator and called a priest, who christened him Alexander. She lay in bed and heard his weak snuffling cries in the next room and then in her weakness, half way between sleep and waking, she recognized Father Nicholas's voice next door intoning the prayers for the dying. The child died that night. The little casket was placed in the vault of a church in Tsarskoe Selo until the time came to take it down to the family vault at Kroupodernitsa. She believed that God had taken him into his mighty arms to spare him the future that groaned and creaked up ahead like the ice under the Neva bridges.

The bitter Petrograd winter came on: darkness fell in the early afternoon, and the wind howled along the quays at dusk. At dawn the city was enveloped in freezing fog. Now stones were hurled out of the darkness at the Ignatieffs' car when they drove into the city.

In November 1916 Paul attended his last Cabinet meeting, convened to consider a response to a motion in the Duma accusing the Cabinet of treason. The Prime Minister lay at one end of a dark and gloomy room, stretched out in an armchair, nursing a gouty foot. All possible stratagems were rejected one after the other. After a long silence, the Prime Minister looked at Paul and said in a dismal voice, ‘Count, you help us.' Angrily, Paul answered: ‘I am kept in this Cabinet against my will. It has become clear that this Cabinet does not dare, has not the moral standing to enter into negotiations with the State Duma or the country.' He said he would not approach the Duma as a representative of the Cabinet, but solely in a personal capacity. When one of the Cabinet members wanted to know what their ‘delegate' proposed to say, Paul declared angrily, ‘It seems to me that I have not been understood. I cannot and do not wish to be a delegate and I shall not give any account of my actions here. If these conditions are not acceptable I shall not move a finger.'

They allowed him one last try to reach an accord with the Duma. But when he had succeeded in negotiating a softening of the Duma's language, he discovered that the Minister of the Interior, Protopopoff, had circulated a rumour to the effect that recalcitrant Duma members would be conscripted for service in the trenches if they passed the original motion. The last chance of reconciliation between government and Duma – if it had ever been a real chance at all – had been sabotaged. Several nights later, the Duma leader Miliukov made a speech whose indictment of the Cabinet rang at the end of every paragraph, ‘Is this stupidity or is it treason?'

Paul journeyed out to headquarters once more in the ministerial train. He pointed out to the Tsar that Protopopoff had made a public statement to the effect that the army had food supplies for four years. ‘What else can this be described as other than a crime?' he asked. ‘If it is so, why are the people standing in queues half starved? What else is it than an effort to provoke the people against the army?' Again the Tsar answered, ‘Thank you. Now my eyes are opened. Stay and work for my sake.' Paul was told to report next morning for a further audience. Paul went the rounds of headquarters pleading with everyone to persuade the Tsar to remove Protopopoff. One of the generals shrugged his shoulders: ‘
Vous plaidez une cause perdue.
' That night Paul was trying to sleep in his ministerial train in a siding of the little country station at Mogilev when his carriage shook to the passage of an express drawing into the station. Looking through the blinds, he could see that the Tsarina had arrived and that the Tsar had gone immediately to her train.

Next morning Paul waited in vain for a summons to the promised audience with the Tsar. At lunch, he watched, with a dawning comprehension, as the Tsar and Tsarina entered, failed to acknowledge his greeting and turned their backs on the cluster of ministers standing at the end of the room. Other officers and Cabinet officials were presented to the Tsarina. He stood apart, aware that she had decided his fate. Two days later he returned for an audience, with a letter of resignation in his hand. He read it to the Tsar in a hoarse and strained voice:

Your Imperial Majesty and Most Gracious Sovereign:

On November 19, at the headquarters of your Majesty, I felt it to be a duty to state that my conscience and my oath of office made it necessary for me to report the apprehensions which cause me concern about the acts of certain persons and the trend of the political life of the country. I implored your Imperial Majesty not to force me to be an accomplice of those persons, whose acts my conscience warned me were ruinous to the throne and the fatherland. In the firm conviction that only a government united in the necessity of the unity of the State, with a common understanding of the fundamental goals of government and of the way in which these can be achieved, can be of any use to your Imperial Majesty and the fatherland. I esteem it my duty as a loyal subject humbly to beg your Imperial Majesty to relieve me from the unbearable burden of serving contrary to the dictates of my conscience.