Edmund A. Walsh - The Fall of The Russian Empire

This is not a formal history of Russia; it is the story of the triumph of folly in Russia and the penalty she paid for that historic madness. Neither is this narrative an apotheosis of the Russian Revolution after the manner of Thomas Carlyle. Least of all should it be interpreted as a smug indictment of Bolshevist theory and practice; the patent excesses in both, though not intelligent, are intelligible. In such a tempestuous riot of unchained passions, the worst that human nature can produce rose to the surface — “red scum, white scum.” But this retrospect does seek to por¬ tray, without retouching, certain outstanding personalities and major events in the hope of supplying the perspective and understanding which becomes indispensable if one hopes to avoid the common errors fostered by propagandists, paid or unpaid, and correct the fallacies of loose thinking and still looser talking indulged in by the pamphleteers.

For the man in the street, the basic and intensely human issues, as well as the serious international problems arising out of that tremendous upheaval, have been systematically obscured or hidden entirely from view. On these momentous times, men, and events, later ages alone can pronounce the final verdict. But contemporary observers can contribute something useful to their day and generation by recording faithfully what they saw, heard, and learned.

The author is aware that no man who sets his name to opinions on Russia can expect to escape the censure which Madelin foresaw for himself in the preface to his study of the French Revolution — to be flayed by every hand, a Ghibelline to the Guelphs, a Guelph to the Ghibellines. But no man can reasonably expect to escape that fate who owes allegiance to those two exacting masters, Truth and Justice.

Wherever possible I have let the leading characters tell their story in their own words, in the belief that we shall come thereby to a surer understanding of the secret prej¬ udices, the controlling emotions, and predominant passions that so often displace pure reason as mainsprings of action. The last Tzar of All the Russias, far from being exempt from the psychological idiosyncrasies that influence men’s judgments, was notoriously subject to them. The shadow of a domestic tragedy lay across his latter years and clouded his reasoning powers. A baby’s fingers had been tugging at his heartstrings for a decade, and the image of the Empress, battling for her boy’s dynastic rights, held first place at every Council of the Empire.

There usually comes a moment in the conscious development of every human soul when some serious choice, or important decision, or difficult renunciation must be made, and made irrevocably. On that decision frequently depend the lives and fortunes of numerous other human beings — as happens in the case of the engineer of a fast express who discerns, dimly, but not surely, some danger signal set against him ; or in the case of the navigator of an ocean liner adrift in a dangerous sea with a broken rudder. Such a moment came to Russia’s supreme ruler in the Spring of 1917. His decision affected 180,000,000 people.

Now, the instinctive, instantaneous reaction of the alert engineer as he reaches for the emergency brake, or the motions of a seasoned pilot as he endeavors to head his ship into the teeth of the storm instead of exposing his craft broadside to the fury of the waves, are not isolated, unrelated facts bearing no reference to previous training and habitual modes of action. Such coordination of sense perception, judgment, and manual execution is not the child of chance nor the unfailing perquisite of genius. It is the hard-won achievement of mental discipline. Men wise in the ways of human nature tell us, too, that there are few real accidents in the moral order, though there are many tragedies.

It was no stern necessity of war, nor gigantic despair, nor sudden conjunction of overpowering circumstances that drove Nicholas II into the course of action that wrecked his Empire and provoked the Revolution. His every deci¬ sion and blunder was a palpable, traceable resultant of previous habits acquired with fatal facility. He lived in the grip of a hidden fear which, because it met him every morning at breakfast, dogged him through his hours of domestic privacy, and slept nearby in the nursery at night, had become inescapable and tyrannous. The elimination of Romanov rule, though inevitable in the long run and a political necessity if the Russian people were to survive, was measurably hastened by a little prince’s inherited weakness of physique and his tendency to bleed at the nose or fall into painful convulsions at the slightest bruising of his sensitive skin. Had her son not been a chronic haemophilic, had she not been an abnormal hypochondriac, the Empress Alexandra might not have been the innocent tool for Rasputin’s machinations, Russia might have been spared the scourges that came upon her, and the world might not have known the challenge of Bolshevism at least not so soon. What men too frequently overlook in chronicling the causes of stirring historic events is the essential humanity of kings and queens and the influence exerted by relatively petty factors on the destiny of states and peoples. Had Anne Boleyn been less comely, Henry VIII might never have repudiated Katherine of Aragon; there might have been no Spanish Armada, no schism, nor religious wars in England. A diamond necklace and a woman’s vanity can never be disassociated from the inner history of the French Revolution and the hecatombs of heads that fell into its baskets. Neither can a withered arm be considered irrelevant by investigators of the role played by the German Kaiser in modern times.

That physical deformity, giving rise, during boyhood, to an inferiority complex in the last of the Hohenzollerns, stimulated a conscious — and legitimate — passion to overcome the handicap. The paralyzed hand was trained to rest in a natural way on the sword-hilt hanging at the Kaiser’s left side; the feel and rattle of the ever-present sabre became part of its wearer’s nature and was a necessary adjunct of every photograph depicting Wilhelm in his favorite histrionic attitude. The fixed idea of personal majesty triumphing over physical limitations became a permanent obsession which transformed itself, eventually, into a political nervosity that unsettled Middle Europe from Berlin to Bagdad and would be satisfied with nothing short of a prominent place somewhere in the sun.

The notes, personal experiences, inquiries, and subsequent research upon which this book is based began on the night when the author first crossed the Russian frontier at Sebesh, between Latvia and Soviet Russia, March 21, 1922. The Russian people, at that moment, were passing through the well-nigh mortal travail of the most appalling famine in their long and stormy history. Twenty-three million human beings were threatened with extermination by inevitable starvation, and their cry for help had been answered generously by Europe and America. Six millions succumbed, — despite the heroic efforts of combined relief agencies, — making the valley of the Volga a huge graveyard, and turning the river itself into a charnel house with thousands upon thousands of skeletonized corpses congealed beneath the ice.

Men spoke of “going in” and “coming out” of that mystery-laden land as they might speak of entering a firstline trench or a sick chamber. For three days the train rumbled and lurched eastward from Riga, crawling 

laboriously onward in the teeth of freezing cold that cut the cheeks like a razor. The engine, through lack of coal, burned only wood, showering weird geysers of sparks and flaming splinters on to the snow fields that stretched like visible, tangible desolation on all sides. There were no lights in the compartments, save the sputtering flicker of tallow candles, carefully husbanded. As no food was available on board, each man brought his own rations and water, which he prepared over an alcohol flame or on a miniature gasoline stove. Primus inter pares was what we called that valuable instrument known to every traveler in Russia. Stops were long and frequent, at one place for exactly twenty-four hours, until a Soviet engine arrived from Moscow to replace the Latvian locomotive. In those days the Lettish Government risked no rolling stock on Soviet territory.

Evening of March 24 found us at the Windau station, in Moscow. There, for the first time, we looked upon the emaciated face of Russia and caught the first reflection of her soul mirrored in the tired eyes of the ragged, jostling, milling mob that thronged this, as every other, railway station. Suffer¬ ing, self-laceration, and the immemorial sadness which Dostoievsky and her poets have exalted into a religious destiny ! Podvig is what the Russians name it — meaning, generically, some great act of self-abnegation, expiation, or sacrifice. Nesterov made it the subject of the famous war poster that thrilled Russia during the dark days of 1916. That is why the bread we brought them was often salted from their own eyes.

One year and eight months later, in the company of a diplomatic courier and a Reuter correspondent who was quitting Russia forever because his wife had recently been burned to death, the writer of these lines crossed the Polish border, at Stolpce. It was late November 1923. Like every other man who saw the result of that revolutionary upheaval and the ghastly fruits of civil war and famine, he left Russia with a fuller understanding of the unbelievable capacity for suffering inherent in the human frame as it responds to the indomitable will of man battling to continue in existence.

The intervening period was passed, not in Moscow and Petrograd alone, but off the beaten path in the Crimea and the Ukraine, in the Caucasus and Black Sea districts, along the Volga and the Sea of Azov, in the Don Cossack country and among the Tatars, in peasant huts and ruined palaces, as well as under the shadow of the Kremlin. The territory covered stretched from the Gulf of Finland to the Kuban, and from the Carpathians to the foothills of the Ural Mountains.

During the course of the succeeding years, from 1924 to 1928, visits were made to practically all the Western coun¬ tries bordering on Soviet Russia or affected by the Revolution, especially to those crowded European centres where Russians of the dispersion most do congregate — Poland, East Prussia, Danzig, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Vienna, London, Rome, Paris, Brussels, Louvain, Namur, Lyons, Geneva, Constantinople, and Berlin.

As the Russian Revolution marked the fall of an empire vaster far than Troy, so its human flotsam and jetsam have been cast up on every shore of the known world. The Russian emigre — that tragic and, be it truthfully said, that most amiable personage — can fairly claim kinship with Virgil’s AEneas when he says: “Quae regio in terra nostri non plena laboris?” And the victorious Russian Communist, preacher of a new Utopia in politics and economics, followed close on the heels of his dispossessed countryman, circling the globe from Chicago to Cathay.

Twenty months, consequently, I spent in Russia during the period of transition and beheld her people

Wandering between two worlds — one dead,

The other powerless to be born.

And for four years more I sought the opinions of many men in many lands, always asking, “What think ye of Russia ?” But the historian who would track the Russian Revolution to its last ramification must embark on an Odyssean search which will lead to many a hidden byway, as well as to legislative chambers, academic halls, and altar rails — wherever, in a word, men foregather to discuss the age-old problems of the race.

One man’s life will not suffice to see the end.