The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

Close to nine million men fell in World War I as a direct result of those two shots fired in a dusty Balkan town roughly half a century ago; then 15,000,000 more in a second, greater conflict implicit in the ending of the first one. The visit that the Habsburg heir and his wife

From the Habsburg viewpoint she might as well have been a chambermaid. “Love makes people lose all sense of dignity,” Francis Joseph exclaimed when he heard the news. The old Emperor had never quite forgiven his heir for this misalliance; it had taken a whole year of stubborn negotiations to win his consent to the marriage. But even Francis Joseph could not have softened the iron writ of Habsburg House Law, the supreme code of the dynasty. At a solemn assembly of the Court and the Privy Council in the ancient Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Francis Ferdinand had been obliged to renounce all rights of rank and succession for his children before taking Sophie as his morganatic wife. He had never forgotten the humiliation.

Archduke ferdinands wife. Married for love not for a treaty

They had three children, Ernst, Max and Sophie, the last two known in the family as Maxl and Sopherl — whom the Archduke adored. Momentarily oblivious to all protocol, he enjoyed sitting on the floor to play with them, often receiving important visitors in this position — and woe to any visitor who did not instantly follow the royal example. The conjugal union of the Habsburg autocrat-to-be with the daughter of the empire’s despised Slav minority seemed a model of bourgeois felicity; actually it was in all probability something more than that: the day they took their last ride together it was still a love match.

To most of the Bosnians who turned out to greet or simply to stare at — their presumptive future monarch and his wife, the date marked a quite different sort of anniversary. June 28 — actually June 15 by the Serbian Orthodox calendar — is the Vidovdan, the Feast of St. Vitus. To the Slav peoples of the Balkan Peninsula it is a holiday unlike any other. For centuries it was a national day of mourning because it commemorates the battle of Kossovo in 1389 when the Turks destroyed the medieval kingdom of Serbia and enslaved its Christian subjects. Since 1912 it has been the symbol of a glorious resurrection — the defeat of the Turks in the first Balkan War that led to their virtual expulsion from Europe.

“Suicide while of unsound mind,” would seem the most likely verdict on the visit to Sarajevo if Francis Ferdinand had not taken along with him the being whom he loved most in the world: his wife. Certainly he would not have exposed her if he had really believed there was danger. His fatal insensitivity to the public temper in Bosnia demonstrates how little human contact there was between the Habsburgs and their subjects.

The assassin fired twice. The first shot hit Francis Ferdinand, tearing through his chest and lodging against his spine. The second, aimed at Potiorek, hit Sophie in the abdomen, either because the gunman’s hand swerved or because she tried to jump up and shield her husband with her body. For a few seconds both of them continued to sit straight; Potiorek thought that the assassin — grabbed by neighbors in the crowd just as he was raising the automatic to put a bullet in his own head — had missed. Then, as the chauffeur finally got the car turned in the right direction and it leaped forward, the Duchess collapsed against the Archduke. He remained upright, but a thin dark rivulet of blood stained the front of his tunic, and the corners of his mouth were red.

the house in front of which the Habsburg Archduke and his wife were shot is a museum dedicated to the memory of their assassins. Just opposite the curb where the royal car stopped a black marble tablet on the wall reads: HERE ON THIS HISTORIC SPOT GAVRILO PRINCIP WAS THE ANNUNCIATOR OF LIBERTY ON THE DAY OF THE VIDOVDAN, JUNE 15 (28), 1914.

Because of his youth Princip escaped the death sentence, as did all but six of the conspirators. He was given twenty years, with the medieval provisos that he be obliged to fast one day every month and that he be placed in solitary confinement for one day each year on the anniversary of his crime. He died of tuberculosis and bad treatment in the prison of Theresienstadt on April 28, 1918, a few months too soon to see the outcome of the world war that his act had precipitated.

Directly or indirectly all the convulsions of the last half century stem back to 1914 and Sarajevo: the two World Wars, the Bolshevik revolution, the rise and fall of Hitler, the continuing turmoil in the Far and Near East, the power-struggle between the Communist world and our own. More than 23,000,000 deaths can be traced to one or the other of these upheavals; all of us who survive have been scarred, at least emotionally, by them. This much is plain.

“I was filled with muffled dread at this vengeance of an inscrutable destiny,” Adolf Hitler relates in his book Mein Kampf. “The greatest friend of the Slavs had fallen under the bullets of Slav fanatics.”

At archdukes assasination

“War between Austria and Russia would be very useful to the cause of the revolution in Western Europe,” Lenin had written a year earlier to one of the most incorrigible of the revolutionary romantics, the Russian writer, Maxim Gorky. “But it is hard to believe that Francis Joseph and Nicholas will give us this pleasure.”

While in what us now Poland when the assassination happened

“Nations and Empires, crowned with princes and potentates, rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace,” he wrote in The World Crisis. “All were fitted and fastened, it seemed securely, into an immense cantilever. The two mighty European systems faced each other glittering and clanking in their panoply, but with a tranquil gaze. A polite, discrete, pacific, and on the whole sincere diplomacy spread its web of connections over both. A sentence in a dispatch, an observation by an ambassador, a cryptic phrase in parliament seemed sufficient to adjust from day to day the balance of the prodigious structure ... The old world, in its sunset, was fair to see.”

Winston Churchill

When the S.S. Titanic, the pride of early twentieth century marine technology, rammed an iceberg and quickly sank on its maiden trip across the Atlantic, most of the first-class passengers, including men as well as women and children, got away in half-empty lifeboats, but 53 children of third-class passengers — not to mention their parents — went down with the ship. “I only realized that the situation was serious when I saw a working-class passenger on the first-class deck,” one of the survivors recounted later.

In 1683 the city rendered a notable service to Christendom by withstanding a Turkish siege, which if it had been successful, would have opened all central Europe to infidel invasion. Vienna recalls the victory with modest pride, but in the collective memory of its citizens the really noteworthy event occurred after the Turks had withdrawn, when a quick-witted Polish mercenary picked up on the battlefield a sack of dark, aromatic beans, previously unknown in the West. A bronze plaque on the coffeehouse that the Pole founded still commemorates the occasion; from the exotic pleasure to which he introduced his adopted fellow countrymen, the Viennese have elaborated over the centuries an art of living and virtually a whole way of life. The coffeehouse culture that reached its apogee in Vienna before 1914 could flourish only in a peaceful world; to the Viennese, as to most other Europeans at the time,

In a society of the content — the only kind the social conscience of the age recognized — pleasure had come to seem almost a civic discipline. Nowhere, of course, was this discipline more conscientiously observed than in Vienna. Scholars have estimated that one out of every three babies born in the pre-war Habsburg capital was illegitimate.

On the whole the Viennese, despite their legendary sophistication, stressed the simpler pleasures: eating, drinking, flirting, and dancing. The dance, especially the waltz, was a general passion.

As James Laver remarks in his delectable Edwardian Promenade: “The Edwardian age was probably the last period in history when the fortunate thought they could give pleasure to others by displaying their good fortune before them.” Extravagant entertainment was one of the forms of display whereby the privileged classes simultaneously kept up the morale of the lower orders and maintained their own station.

Dress, of course, was an essential form of display. Being seen in the right clothes at the right time in the right place was one of the obsessions of the age. A male guest at a quiet British weekend party was expected to don, or change into, the approved costumes for breakfast and church, for lounging about in the morning, for eating lunch, for lounging about in the afternoon, for taking tea (a velvet jacket) and for dinner (white tie and tails). Female guests put on filmy tea gowns for the afternoon ritual; for dinner they wore formal dresses with trains and carried ostrich feather fans.

Passports were not yet required in most European countries, and the leading currencies could be exchanged everywhere; no customs inspector’s eyes turned hard if he heard the chink of gold sovereigns, francs or marks as a traveler’s luggage was shifted. This glorious freedom of movement has inspired some writers to draw an overidyllic picture of pre-1914 Europe as a continent practically without internal frontiers. In reality much depended on who you were and what you were traveling for; there were few restrictions for wealthy and titled pleasure seekers, but some 400,000 of Francis Joseph’s poorer subjects were annually forced by economic pressures to slip by stealth through the primitive iron curtain set up to halt emigration from his realms, while the long Russian borders were policed almost as closely then as now. Despite

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In the leading Vienna cafes anyone with the price of a cup of coffee and enough time on his hands could read every day not only the whole Austro-Hungarian press but all the important German and Swiss papers, the London Times, the Paris Le Temps and Journal des Debats and miscellaneous Italian, Russian, and American papers.

“Vienna,” Sigmund Freud wrote, a few years before the war to his German friend Wilhelm Fliess, “after all is Vienna, that is to say disgusting in the highest degree.” Freud detested the moral squalor of an age and a society whose sexuality was simultaneously overheated and hypocritical; he was appalled by the submerged vestiges of primitive savagery that his new technique of psychoanalysis was constantly uncovering in the minds of supposedly civilized twentieth-century adults.

So was Freud!

Vienna society was stricter, particularly in the case of Jewish doctors. The social and racial arrogance of the European ruling classes, which contributed so largely to the revolutionary upheavals of the following generation — above all to the anticolonialist revolution after World War II — flourished in its most anachronistic, if not in its most extreme form in the cultured, cosmopolitan capital of the Habsburgs before 1914.

Cursed as God told Abraham

“Vienna, where Freud lived from his fourth to his 82nd year ... was the most anti-Semitic of all the great cities of the world,” says Sperber. (Czarist Russia was the most anti-Semitic country, however. “The American nation owes it to itself to confess its horror when it hears of massacres as terrible as those of Kishinev,” said President Theodore Roosevelt after a particularly atrocious pogrom in southern Russia.)

writings of Karl Lueger, the immensely popular Christian Socialist Mayor of Vienna, and in those of the Pan-German demagogue Georg von Schonerer. One particularly rabid follower of Lueger, Ernst Schneider, even foreshadowed the Nazi extermination camps by publicly recommending that all Jews be placed aboard a large ship which would then be scuttled on the high seas. Vienna’s anti-Semitism — along with the conflicting nationalist passions that erupted in incessant student brawls at the university — was no doubt intensified by the social misery of which Hitler got such a bitter taste during his six years in the Habsburg capital.

Helped inspire the Holocaust

Some 45 per cent of the Viennese population in 1900 lived in fiats of one or two small rooms; one Viennese in twenty had no room of his own at all, but lived as a bettgeher, sleeping, for a few pennies, in someone else’s bed while its regular occupant was at work, or spending the nights in one of the ghastly “warming rooms” (flophouses) maintained by private charity. The most miserable slept on the grass of the Prater in summer and lived all winter, as Hitler was able to observe, in the damp tepid stench of the sewage canals. Hitler himself was doubtless a bettgeher for a time, and Jenks believes that he probably slept on occasion in the Prater or in a “warming room.” In later life, the Nazi Fuehrer still shuddered to recall those “pitiful dens” and those “sinister pictures of dirt and repugnant filth, and worse still.”

Wilhelm, however, had not slipped off to Bjorkoe just to enjoy a family outing with his Russian cousins away from prying journalists and monocled gossipmongers. He had come to make history. He was going to outdo his old mentor Bismarck, who, after forging German unity and seating Wilhelm’s grandfather on the Imperial throne, had gained the admiration of all Europe’s professionals by his adroit diplomacy. Bismarck had once taken out reinsurance against the dangers of encirclement and the fundamental insecurity of the European security system by signing a secret nonaggression pact with Russia.

At secret meeting in Finland with Russia

“I wish you would assume, from now on, the title of Admiral of the Pacific,” he had said to Nicholas on that occasion, “I shall call myself Admiral of the Atlantic.” Steaming away from the meeting the Kaiser had ordered the Hohenzollern to make the signal, “The Admiral of the Atlantic salutes the Admiral of the Pacific.” Annoyance with his British cousin, Edward VII, had helped Wilhelm’s diplomatic evolution.

the Kaiser had written the Czar around the end of 1904 suggesting an alliance between their two empires as the best way to safeguard European peace. France, as Russia’s ally, would virtually be obliged to join in, Wilhelm had pointed out to his cousin; the proposed Berlin-St. Petersburg axis would thus become in effect a new continental coalition against Britain, Russia’s hereditary rival in Asia. The immediate reaction had been disappointing to Wilhelm. The Czar had shown the letter to his ministers; they had consulted the French allies. The project was quietly pigeonholed while a discreet snicker ran around the chancelleries of Europe. By My, however, the Kaiser felt that the changing European situation justified another try. The Russo-Japanese War, which had broken out in February 1904, was lost. The virtual annihilation of the main Russian fleet in the Straits of Tsushima on May 27, 1905, had deprived the Czar of his last hope. Revolutionary unrest was mounting in Russia. Nicky would be looking for friends.

The first greetings had hardly been exchanged before Nicholas spontaneously brought up the name of Edward VII, whom he described as “the greatest mischiefmaker and the most dangerous intriguer in the whole world.” The Czarina was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria — who was also Wilhelm’s grandmother — and Nicholas himself was the nephew of Edward’s consort, Queen Alexandra, but family ties had become strained during the current war by Britain’s manifest sympathy with its Japanese allies, especially since the previous October.

The treaty of Bjorkoe, considered by Wilhelm as a landmark of modern history, provided for a defensive alliance between the two empires which was to come into effect as soon as peace had been concluded between Russia and Japan. The Kaiser had written in a stipulation restricting its scope, originally world-wide, to Europe, where each signatory was pledged to come to the aid of the other if it was attacked by a third party. Article Four laid down that after the treaty had come into force the Czar should invite France to join the pact. In a letter to the Czar immediately after his return from the Bjorkoe meeting — which he characterized as “a cornerstone of European politics” and a “new leaf in the history of the world” — Wilhelm outlined the role he envisaged for France in the new European order: “Marianne [France] must remember that she is wedded to you and that she is obliged to lie in bed with you and eventually to give a hug or a kiss now and then to me, but not to sneak into the bedroom of the ever-intriguing touche-a-tout on the Island [Edward].”

In any case, the whole Bjorkoe affair horrified his ministers when he was finally obliged to let them in on the secret. “Monstrous! We shall be dishonored in the eyes of the French,” was the immediate reaction of the professionals in St. Petersburg.

Wilhelm had not fared much better in Berlin. Even Holstein castigated Bjorkoe as “operetta politics” and Bulow flew into a rage because the Kaiser, after altering the original text of the draft treaty — the limitation of its scope to Europe — had signed it without consulting his Chancellor. Tears, tantrums and hysterics became daily occurrences at the imperial court. Bulow handed in his resignation; Wilhelm, refusing to accept it, whined and sniveled like a jilted schoolgirl. “To be treated like this by my best and most intimate of friends,” the deflated would-be Bismarck wailed in a reproachful letter to his disgruntled Chancellor. “It has dealt me such a terrible blow that I feel quite broken and cannot but fear I may have a serious nervous attack. Telegraph ‘All Right,’ as soon as you get this, and then I shall know you are not going. For the day after I receive your resignation, the Emperor will no longer exist! Think of my poor wife and children.”

“We have joined our hands together religiously,” he wired Nicholas. “We have given our signatures before God, who has heard the promise we swore. I consider, therefore, that the treaty is still in force. If you desire some alterations of detail, propose them to me. But what is signed is signed. God is our witness.” Nicholas did not reply. He never forgave Wilhelm for having duped him. Consciousness of the shabby role he himself had played, whether from weakness or from duplicity, probably added to his bitterness. The affectionate relations which had existed between the two cousins for ten years were at an end, and the Anglo-Russian accord of 1907, completing the encirclement of Germany and the definitive crystallization of Europe into two hostile power-blocs, was in sight. Wilhelm had indeed succeeded in making history at Bjorkoe, though not in the way he intended.

It was the decaying European dynastic system itself, and the whole philosophy and machinery of foreign relations linked to it, that made war inevitable, thereby dooming the social order based on the system.

“In the house of the Romanovs, as in that of the Atrides,” notes the Russian writer Merejkovsky, commenting on the 1905 revolution, “a mysterious curse descends from generation to generation. Murder and adultery, blood and mud, ‘the fifth act of a tragedy played in a brothel.’ Peter I kills his son; Alexander I kills his father; Catherine II kills her husband. And besides these great and famous victims, there are the mean, unknown and unhappy abortions of the autocracy, such as Ivan Antonovitch, suffocated like mice in dark corners, in the cells of the Schlusselburg. The block, the rope, and poison — these are the true emblems of the Russian autocracy.”

Nicholas II never murdered anyone —except some thousands of his subjects in the line of duty — and his private life, at least to the non-Freudian eye, was free from any unwholesome Aegean taint He was a dutiful son, a devoted, not to say doting husband, a model father, and a conscientious monarch. Save for a brief early fling with the famous ballerina Ksesinskaya — the height of conventionality for a royal prince in those times

The founder of the dynasty, Michael Romanov, the scion of a noble family that had distinguished itself in the wars against the Poles, acceded painlessly to the vacant, disputed throne at the age of fifteen in 1613, thanks to a general longing for order, and to a surge of patriotic feeling in reaction to foreign invasion after the twenty-nine-year ‘Time of Troubles’ that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible. Almost immediately, however, Michael had to use ruthless force to crush new peasant or Cossack rebellions that threatened to plunge the country back into anarchy.

In the process they reanimated the decaying institution of serfdom, formalized it, made it hereditary, and gave the gentry increased authority over their peasants. Thus, at the moment when Western Europe was finally emerging, in a social sense, from the Middle Ages, Russia set the clock back to the hours of darkness.

Michael Romanov’s grandson, Peter the Great (1682-1725), established or reinforced some other typical Russian patterns. A giant of a man, both literally and figuratively, Peter completed the structure of the centralized, bureaucratic autocracy whose foundations Ivan the Terrible had laid more than a century earlier. He turned Russia into a vast military barracks and transformed the aristocracy into his officer caste.

With his own hand he shaved off the beards of his chief lieutenants; beards were un-European and un-modern. So was Moscow, the cradle of the Russian monarchy and state; Peter determined to build himself a new capital on the recently conquered Baltic shore, facing west toward the Europe whose technology and culture he admired so intemperately. The marsh at the mouth of the Neva seemed a strategically suitable place, and there, using Italian architects and forced native labor, he built St. Petersburg.

The great novelist Ivan Turgenev had coined the name “Nihilists,” for them; their models or intellectual masters were the venerable anarchist writer and apostle of terrorism, Mikhail Bakunin, Serge Nechayev, the monstrous prototype of the conscienceless revolutionary in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, and Peter Tkachev, the theoretician of revolution through professionally organized conspiracy, to whom Lenin, among others, owed a great intellectual debt. (Tkachev once recommended that every Russian over the age of twenty-five be put to death as incapable of moving with the times.)

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In 1887 a twenty-year old student-terrorist took part in a plot organized by the Will of the People to kill the Czar on the anniversary of Alexander II’s assassination, was arrested and condemned to death. His mother applied for permission to visit him in prison. “I think it would be advisable to allow her to visit her son,” the Czar scribbled on the margin of the letter that the despairing woman had sent him, “so that she might see for herself what kind of person this precious son of hers is.” Explaining his act — or rather his intended act — at his trial, the student said: “Under a system which permits no freedom of expression and crushes every attempt to work for their [the people’s] welfare and enlightenment by legal means, the only instrument that remains is terror.” The young man was hanged, with four of his fellow conspirators in the courtyard of the Schlusselberg fortress on the morning of May 20, 1887. His name was Alexander Ulyanov and he had a seventeen-year old brother, Vladimir, who later became a conspirator himself and took the pen name Nikolai Lenin.

Nicholas’ tutor — he had also been the tutor of Alexander III — was not merely a fanatical reactionary, but a philosopher of reaction. Born in 1827, he spent his life reacting against the wrong revolution — the French one of 1789.

Pobedonostsev’s doctrine of autocracy, which the young Nicholas had uncritically made his own, was grounded in religious mysticism. Its essence, as one of Pobedonostsev’s disciples explained to the French ambassador, Maurice Paleologue, was that: “The Czar is the anointed of the Lord, sent by God to be the supreme guardian of the Church and the all-powerful ruler of the empire ... As he receives his power from God, it is to God alone that he must account for it ... Constitutional liberalism is a heresy as well as a stupid chimera.”

As Czar, Nicholas not only based state policy on the royal whim, but would hardly trust anyone but himself to carry it out. Delegating authority, he felt, undermined the autocratic principle. He was jealous of officials who were too successful in carrying out his own orders. He tried to run his sprawling twentieth-century empire, with its top-heavy bureaucracy, its chaotically expanding industry and its complex foreign relations, the way Peter the Great had run seventeenth-century Russia. Nicholas, refusing the help of a private secretary, regularly insisted on himself sealing the envelopes into which he sent out official documents; such work-habits had a good deal to do with the chronic bureaucratic anarchy or paralysis that was an important factor in the ultimate collapse of the Romanov dynasty.

Jews were at the bottom of the ladder and anti-Semitism was a formal State policy, though Jews could escape official persecution by joining the Orthodox Church. Nicholas II tightened Catherine the Great’s edict aimed at confining the Jews to a kind of ghetto zone along the western borders and tolerated the pogroms which fanatics or hooligans periodically instigated against them.

Though he theoretically disapproved of it, Lenin himself slipped back from exile to help steer the St Petersburg Soviet into the course of all-out revolution. Lenin’s direct contribution to the dramatic events of 1905 was less substantial, however, than that of a younger Marxist intellectual, Leon Trotsky, whose name for the first time now became known to millions of Russian workers. Trotsky, bora Lev Davydovich Bronstein, the son of a well-to-do Jewish fanner, shared many of Lenin’s viewpoints, but he refused to take sides in the quarrel that had developed between the Bolshevik and the Menshevik (Minority) factions within what was still theoretically a united Social-Democratic party, and he was not particularly close to Lenin at the time.

Parallel to the official repression, Nicholas, under the influence of Pobedonostsev and another old Mend of his father’s, Prince Vladimir Meshcherski, a paleo-fascist, whose incendiary propaganda sheet, Grashdanin (The Citizen) was the only newspaper he regularly read, encouraged the formation of monarchist-nationalist vigilante groups. These gangs, later known as the “Black Hundred” bands (after one of the medieval guilds), specialized in protecting the throne by beating, robbing, and killing Jews. Nicholas strongly approved. Jews were “nine-tenths of the trouble,” he explained to his mother, and this infuriated the people, leading to pogroms.

Some of the ideological roots of German National Socialism were planted in Russia during the year 1905, and Russian Right-Wing Radicals like Meshcherski count among the intellectual ancestors of the Nazi theoreticians Goebbels and Rosenberg.

A venerable, and in some respects, benevolent, despot, thinly disguised as a constitutional monarch, Francis Joseph, as we shall see, was deliberately exploiting the hunger for electoral reform, touched off among the most advanced of his subjects by the apparent liberal victory in Russia, in order to blackmail a peculiarly backward group — the Hungarians — who were threatening to give him trouble for reactionary reasons. His political strategy suggested the naive Machiavellism that one might expect from some harassed overlord of the Middle Ages, emancipating his burghers to humble his barons, and the analogy is not wholly accidental; politically speaking Austria-Hungary was in many ways a fossil remnant of Medieval Europe, embedded in twentieth-century history. The Habsburg lands had developed into an empire without ever becoming a nation. Stretching from Lake Constance on the Swiss-German border to the Transylvanian Alps, and from Lemberg (today Lvov) in Poland, to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and Trieste on the Adriatic, Austria-Hungary was the second largest state in Europe from the viewpoint of area, with 240,456 square miles and the third largest in population, with something over 50,000,000 subjects, speaking a dozen different languages and dialects. “Eight nations, seventeen countries, twenty parliamentary groups, twenty-seven parties,” sighed one Austro-Hungarian statesman cited by the French historian, Pierre Renouvin.