A people's tragedy

A complete inability to handle and command his subordinates was one obvious deficiency. Throughout his life Nicholas was burdened by a quite unnatural sense of decorum. He hid his emotions and feelings behind a mask of passive reserve which gave the impression of indifference to those, like Chernov and Trotsky, who observed him from a distance. He tactfully agreed with everyone who spoke to him rather than suffer the embarrassment of having to contradict them. This gave rise to the witticism, which went round the salons of St Petersburg, that the most powerful man in Russia was the last man to have spoken to the Tsar. Nicholas was too polite to confront his ministers with complaints about their work, so he left it to others to inform them of their discharge. Count Witte recalled his own dismissal as President of the Council of Ministers: ‘We [Nicholas and Witte] talked for two solid hours. He shook my hand. He embraced me. He wished me all the luck in the world. I returned home beside myself with happiness and found a written order for my dismissal lying on my desk.’ Witte believed that the Tsar derived some curious satisfaction from tormenting his ministers in this way. ‘Our Tsar’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘is an Oriental, a hundred per cent Byzantine.’ Such unpredictable behaviour gave rise to feelings of insecurity within the ruling circles. Damaging rumours began to circulate that the Tsar was involved in various court conspiracies, or, even worse, that he did not know his own mind and had become the unwitting tool of dark and hidden forces behind the scenes. The fact that Nicholas relied on a kitchen cabinet of reactionary advisers (including Pobedonostsev, Procurator-General of the Holy Synod, and the notorious newspaper editor, Prince Meshchersky, whose homosexual lovers were promoted to prominent positions at court) merely added fuel to this conspiracy theory — as of course in later years Rasputin did.