vigorously in deed. As they said at Petrograd, he was “wooden”; and, even when he saw the unhappy state of things, he did nothing. Equally weak was he when a section of the Court clique hatched a plan to let the Germans through to Petrograd in order that they might save Tsardom. The news I had received in London about Goremykin proved that this plan did not stand alone. Though, in comparison with his successor, Goremykin was a Russian Minister of the better sort, he did not shrink from the idea of courting defeat and of letting the Germans march into the Russian capital so that they might put things in order.
To the Tsar’s weakness and untrustworthiness the history of his reign bears frequent witness. In the Björkö affair of 1905, for instance, he heeded the whisperings of the Emperor William—whose plan showed a remarkable degree of political short-sightedness—and promised that Russia would be a party to a Franco-German alliance against England. Witte and the Foreign Minister, Count Lamsdorff, had to prevent the ratification of the Treaty at the last moment. The Tsar was just as foolish during the war. At the wish of the Tsaritsa he took over the Chief Command himself and did nothing but harm; he dismissed good men like Sazonof and accepted creatures like Stürmer. In our case, as we shall see, he broke his promise in the same way as, in the Björkö affair, he had gone back on his signed word.
Witte, in his Memoirs, says that the Tsar was a very well-bred man but, as regards education, on a level with a Colonel of the Guards of good family—a judgment terribly borne out by the published extracts from the Tsar’s private diary at the time of the Revolution and of his abdication. He was a pure nonentity. In distrusting his whole policy and character I see that I was not unfair to him. The Tsarist Sodom and Gomorrah had to be destroyed with fire and brimstone—not only the Court and Court society—for the demoralization had spread to all social strata, including the so-called “intelligentsia” and even the peasantry. Tsarism, the whole political and ecclesiastical system, had demoralized Russia.
In insisting upon the moral defects of Tsarism I am well aware that the morality and immorality of a community naturally show themselves throughout the official and military administration. Of this moral deficiency the inadequate provisioning of the Army and of the civil population was one result, a result, moreover, which revenged itself upon the Government and the system. Practically, the Revolution in
