Shouldering the White Russian's burden
John Jolliffe
Dominic Lieven's subject is vaguely familiar to countless readers, but he claims convincingly and inoffensively that all pre- vious biographies are defective in one way or another; that the subject has often been trivialised; and that irrelevant Western lib- eral or socialist assumptions have been inappropriately imposed on Russian history of the period.
His first chapter is a solid and highly informative general introduction, of great value to all but those who are already experts, and the next two, on the childhood and youth of Nicholas, are more relaxed and personal. His powerful and imposing father, Alexander III, died quite unexpect- edly in 1904 at the age of 49, and the 26- year-old Nicholas inherited the throne just three weeks before his marriage. His bride's parents were the Grand Duke of Hesse, and Alice, the second daughter of Queen Victoria, and they were both already dead. Alexandra had only been six when her mother died, and she and her grandmother became deeply devoted to each other, to the extent that her upbring- ing was if anything more English than Ger- man. But her isolation was increased by the fact that on her marriage she spoke no Russian.
Nicholas suffered acutely from lack of experience and self-confidence, which was combined with a conviction that
supreme power was an obligation he had received from God at his coronation, and he had no right to shed it onto the shoulders of others.
The tragedy was that his own were so unfit Portrait of Crown Prince Aleksei Nikolaevich, 1913 Boissonas & Eggler Photographic Studio for the task. In the following January, there occurred the lamentable scene outside the Winter Palace, where a crowd of peaceful demonstrators, some of them loyal to the point of carrying portraits of Nicholas, was fired on by a force of infantry instead of being dispersed by police and cavalry, as could so easily have been done Over a hundred were killed. Nicholas commented in his diary 'Lord, how painful and sad', and the inadequacy of his reaction typifies his inability to fill the virtually impossible role which he had inherited with such terrible suddenness and so little prepara- tion.
From then on the story is more familiar. Reforms were set on foot, after a fashion, with the formation of the Duma after the disastrous Japanese war and the general strike of October 1905, but the author aptly quotes de Tocqueville's maxim that the most dangerous time for a repressive regime is when it begins to reform itself as true in 1905 as under Gorbachev in the 1980s. Lieven's last chapter, 'Then and Now', draws some fascinating parallels. The important thing is that, bludgeoned and betrayed for 75 years by a regime which ignored the people's interests more deceitfully and cruelly than any of its pre- decessors, Russia, unlike the regime, still exists.
As far as the administrative and institu- tional side of the Tsar's life is concerned, the author's qualifications are excellent. He is Russian by origin, but with an Irish mother, an English education and a Japanese wife, he is not only Russian. He has been working and teaching in this field for the last 15 years with intelligence, dedi- cation and infectious enthusiasm. But what interests him above all is the business of government (and one of the mysteries that he leaves unsolved is how, in the prevailing chronic fog of incompetence, Russia was ever administered at all). He does not, however, appear to be particularly interest- ed in individual characters, and there are few vivid touches bringing the strange scene to life, of a kind that could easily have been gathered from contemporary accounts such as the riveting memoirs of Maurice Paleologue, the last French Ambassador to St Petersburg. In a sense, therefore, this book often reads less like a biography of Nicholas II than a study of the administrative background of his reign. As such it could hardly be bettered, and will perhaps never be supplanted. It is, above all, an original book, with some surprising and sometimes moving details. In particu- lar, it deserves to be read by all active members of the surviving royal families of Europe, most of whom are, of course, related to its central figure.
Photography in Russia 1840-1940 is a selection from state and private collections in Russia recently open for inspection. Such scenes as the panorama of Moscow in 1890, the portrait of Pasternak by Mosei Nappel'baum and that of Alexander Herzen by Sergei Livitskii in 1865 are strik- • ing, as is the practice of colouring black and white photographs with watercolour. But few of the photographs in this book are as evocative as those in the admirable Before the Revolution by Kyril Fitzlyon and Tatiana Browning (Penguin, 1992) or Farmborough's Russian Album (Michael Russell, 1977).
Previous page
