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

by Edmond Taylor

The Emperor crypt of the Capuchin chapel in the heart of Old Vienna is the family mausoleum of the Habsburgs. The dust of twelve emperors and fifteen empresses lies there in the golden gloom, watched over by four crowned skulls whose sightless eye sockets are turned toward the red and white tomb of Frederick III (d. 1493), the first member of the dynasty to use the title. To the modern eye there seems as much pride as humility in the baroque symbolism; there was a time when the Habsburg realms were second only to the universal monarchy for which the crowned skulls stand. It was Frederick who adopted and carved over a gate of the Hofburg the boastful motto AEIOU, an interchangeable Latin-German anagram (Austriae est imperare orbi universo or Alles Erdreich ist Oesterreich untertkan) signifying that it is Austria’s destiny to rule the world.

Taylor, “In the Habsburg Empire peoples are a complication in the history of a dynasty ... No other family has endured so long or left so deep a mark upon Europe.” The first Habsburg king was born in 1218, exactly 700 years before the last one, the Emperor Charles, abandoned his throne. Rudolph of Habsburg was a feudal lord whose possessions amounted to a few hundred acres of wooded rolling country on the Swiss plateau, in Alsace, and southern Germany. He descended from an already ancient family whose name derived from a castle built in the eleventh century: the “Habichtsburg” or castle of the hawk. The walls of the ruined keep, six feet thick, still stand and can be visited near Zurich, in Switzerland From his ancestors — one of them was Count of Zurich — Rudolph had inherited the protectorate over the “Waldstatte,” the original Swiss cantons whose struggle against their Habsburg overlords was later dramatized in the legend of Wilhelm Tell.

In the fifteenth century however, a Habsburg Emperor, Frederick III, finally made it practically hereditary by the simple device of having his son elected heir-presumptive during his lifetime; successive Habsburgs adopted the practice as a family tradition. The same Frederick, a colorless but ambitious ruler, founded another Habsburg tradition, that of expansion by matrimony. “Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nube” (“Let others wage war, but you, happy Austria, marry”) became the unofficial Habsburg motto. Frederick’s son, Maximilian, (1459-1519) who married the Netherlands and a nice strip of eastern France, perfected the policy. He betrothed his heir to a bride whose intellect was cloudy but whose dowry was brilliant; Joan the Crazy, daughter to their Most Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain (and, thanks to Christopher Columbus, of certain lands beyond the ocean sea).

With Maximilian the Habsburgs began to bulge out of their purely German frame and become a European dynasty, but Maximilian himself, depicted in a portrait by Albrecht Durer as a sharp-nosed, splendid grand seigneur, was above all a Viennese. He was born in the city, and there he lies buried. Brilliant and flighty, he was described by his Florentine contemporary, Niccolo Machiavelli as “the greatest spendthrift of our time, or any other.” Naturally, Vienna loved him.

In the seventeenth century the Emperor Leopold I declared the ancient crowns of St. Stephen (Hungary) and St. Wenceslas (Bohemia-Moravia, that is roughly modern Czechoslovakia) as hereditary possessions of the Habsburg family, along with the Holy Roman one made for Otto the Great in 962 and the almost equally famous Iron Crown of Lombardy. At the same time he began the process of whittling away Hungarian and Czech liberties, thus planting the seeds of two particularly virulent nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalisms.

After the downfall of Napoleon, the Habsburgs recovered many of their lands but did not attempt to revive the Holy Roman Empire. Their immovable Chancellor, Prince Klemens von Metternich, a prim-faced, iron-willed zealot of reaction, took charge of the Habsburg destinies and in their name propagated the ideology of the traditionalist counterrevolution. It was mainly due to Metternich’s influence that the Holy Alliance of Christian monarchs, proposed by Czar Alexander I at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, emerged as a repressive league for the maintenance of the dynastic and territorial status quo in Europe.

Metternich’s phobia was an understandable one. Austria, that is the remains of the Habsburg empire, was not a nation in the sense that France, England, Prussia, Spain, and even Alexander’s Russia were nations.

After Britain’s Queen Victoria, he was the supreme personification of nineteenth-century values and tradition; he was born eleven years later than she was, but survived her by fifteen. In all he reigned sixty-eight years. Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States when Francis Joseph died, in 1916 at the age of eighty-six. Andrew Jackson was President the year he was born, 1830. Metternich, Talleyrand, and Wellington were all active in public life; Goethe and Lafayette were yet alive; Francis Joseph’s grandfather, Emperor Francis I, who had been defeated at Austerlitz and Wagram by Napoleon, was still reigning.

In Austria the Emperor was the effective head of the government as well as the chief of state and commander-in-chief of the army; Francis Joseph’s rule has been described as one of latent absolutism, and he was shrewd enough to preserve the element of latency whenever possible. He had some gift for administration, and unlike Nicholas II was not unwilling or afraid to delegate authority.

He humorlessly insisted that the guards on duty at the Imperial Palace present arms every time a carriage bearing a baby Archduke with a nursemaid entered or left the grounds. He tried to forbid Francis Ferdinand’s morganatic marriage as he had forbidden Rudolph’s divorce, and when the marriage eventually did take place, he permitted his courtiers to snub and humiliate the wife of the heir to the throne, even after he had reluctantly conferred the title of Duchess of Hohenberg on her. For a Habsburg to marry a commoner was a sin against the dynasty in the old Emperor’s eyes, and the wages of sin had to be paid. In such matters he was a fanatic and a tyrant.

For centuries it was the world’s largest power — in its heyday it held substantial remnants of the ancient empires of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, Rome, and Byzantium — and in a military sense it was for long periods the most formidable one.

Ottoman empire (Muslim) is reviving today along with Rome

The rise of Ottoman power was, of course, swifter and more spectacular than its decline. Orkhan (1326-1359), the son of the dynasty’s founder, exploited factional strife in the Byzantine Empire to gain himself a solid bridgehead on the European shore of the Dardanelles. In 1389 the destruction of Serbian power on the famous field of Kossovo opened most of southeastern Europe to the Ottoman invaders. In 1453 the Sultan Mohammed II, the Conqueror (1451-1481), stormed Constantinople, then defeating Venice, the great naval power of the Eastern Mediterranean, overran Albania and Bosnia; he also seized the Crimea and the adjacent Black Sea coasts. With the occupation of Constantinople and the extinction of the Paleologus dynasty, the Ottoman Empire became the political heir of Byzantium and took over many of its administrative institutions, along with the refinements and the vices of Byzantine civilization.

Peaceful muslims!

The high-water mark of Ottoman expansion was reached in the sixteenth century under Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566) and his successors, when much of Central Europe, practically all of Greece and the Greek Islands, vast tracts in southern Russia, and North Africa, as far west as Algiers, fell under the Ottoman sway.

Peaceful muslims!

Perhaps the most striking symbol of Ottoman decadence — and the actual root of much of it — was the sultanate’s harem system. In the morning of the empire the unveiled Turkish women were the free and respected companions of their warrior-husbands. With the accumulation of wealth based on conquest, they gradually changed from partners into luxuries, and finally into luxury-objects. The superabundance of female slaves that were one of the prized spoils of war led to a kind of erotic inflation; the Sultans, and their principal warlords acquired increasingly imposing retinues of concubines, and the harem came into being.

Actually this was true islam because a man can have 4 wives at a time

The fact that the harem was a whole slave society led to disastrous results. Its considerable population — under Abdul Medjid, the Red Sultan’s father, there were 900 women in the harem, served by innumerable domestics (300 cooks alone), black and white eunuchs, mutes, guards, pages, etc. — being utterly dependent upon the favor of a despot, waged continual war among one another for first place in that favor, using the arts of sycophancy, flattery, bribery, spying, denunciation, wheedling, and pandering to all the weaknesses and vices of the Sultan, which were sedulously cultivated to provide opportunities to curry favor by satisfying them. It was in this atmosphere that the future Sultans spent the formative years of their lives.

Women are property in islam

If, therefore, it was the goal of every ambitious woman in the harem to bear the Sultan a son and bring him to the throne, so it was the object of every other woman in the harem to prevent either the birth or the accession of any son but her own. The perils of a potential Sultan thus began before birth, and the first care of an expectant mother was to keep her pregnancy secret as long as possible, no easy feat in the public life of the harem, shared with several hundred other jealous women. Once a child was brought into the world, the second problem was to preserve it from “accidents” — also difficult, as is evidenced, for instance, by the fact that of the thirty or so children sired by Abdul Medjid half died in babyhood.

Started back with their ancestor, Ishmaels mother

To foil possible conspirators, Abdul Hamid kept shifting beds — he had plenty to choose from — and at times of special stress the most important responsibility of the duty-concubine who shared with him the bed he had chosen for the night was to make sure that no one, or no thing, was hiding beneath it. The kitchens where the Sultan’s meals were cooked had barred windows, and the food arrived on his table in sealed containers; even so, the chief chamberlain had to taste each dish before the Sultan did. The very cows in the model farm at Yildiz were kept under guard, to make sure that no one tampered with the ruler’s milk. When he was obliged to appear in public, the Sultan always had one of his little sons ride beside him in the Imperial carriage, as a psychological deterrent to assassination. To give himself the illusion of freedom in his self-imposed prison, Abdul Hamid had several fully staffed cafes set up in the grounds of Yildiz for his exclusive use, and he would often stroll into one or the other of them, take a solitary seat at one of the tables, clap his hands for the waiter, and on leaving would even fling down a coin to pay for his coffee which, however, could only be prepared for him by the Cafedfi Bachi, the Royal Coffeemaker.

A few months after his accession Abdul Hamid, on December 23, 1876, proclaimed the constitution for which the Young Ottomans and their sympathizers had been clamoring. The move was beautifully timed; an international conference — which the Ottoman Empire had not been invited to attend, but to which it was the involuntary host — was then sitting in Constantinople. It had been called by Queen Victoria’s subtle Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, following some specially frightful Turkish massacres in Bulgaria, with the double objective of protecting the Christian minorities and of dissuading the Russians from seizing the Dardanelles in a fit of righteous indignation. The delegates of the European Concert, meeting in the Russian embassy, were within a few commas of completing a joint ultimatum to the Sublime Port demanding autonomy for the Christians of Bulgaria and Bosnia when an artillery salvo announced the proclamation of a constitution — the first one in Ottoman history. That salvo blew up the conference; the constitution gave the Sultan’s subjects all the guaranties they could ask for — on paper — and after such a gesture there could be no further question of international sanctions.

Christians talked a muslim leader into giving people rights

As Caliph of Islam, however, he could not afford to punish Moslem rebels against Christian colonialism. He refused, Britain thereupon occupied Egypt (1881). In retaliation, Abdul Hamid, up to then something of an Anglophile, turned away from England toward Germany. He accepted a German military mission to reorganize the Ottoman armies and gave German firms railroad concessions which eventually culminated in the German-financed project for a line to the Persian Gulf — the famous Berlin-to-Bagdad railway.

The nascent Anglo-German tensions — they did not become acute until after 1906 — were sharpened after the discovery of oil in Mesopotamia — by German “archaeologists” — and by a second visit that Wilhelm paid to Turkey in 1898. Traveling through Palestine and Syria, the Kaiser laid a wreath on Saladin’s tomb, and in Damascus, where he appeared in public dressed as a Bedouin sheik, he commemorated the friendship between Haroun al-Raschid and Charlemagne and pledged Germany’s armed might to help his friend, the Caliph Abdul Hamid, defend the cause of Islam.

The reason today Muslims are apologized to

In the early spring of 1909 the Moslem Brotherhood, a recently created secret counterrevolutionary society — for whose activities Abdul Hamid accepted no responsibility — instigated a mutiny of private soldiers and non-coms against their Young Turk officers in the main barracks of the capital. Mobs of religious fanatics, led by Moslem theological students — and in some cases by unemployed former spies of the Sultan — joined the rioting troops. For a few days the counterrevolution took over Istanbul; the Committee of Union and Progress had to go underground again, and a return to autocracy seemed close at hand, though Abdul prudently refrained from committing himself.

The dictator was the Iron Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, who was called in for the purpose in 1862 and who for the next twenty-eight years dominated Prussia, Germany, his king, and European politics. The aims of this great hulk of a man, blunt to the point of rudeness, Prussian to the marrow, were cynically explicit. “The great problems of our times will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions,” he scoffingly told the Prussian Landtag, “but by iron and blood.” It took Bismarck six years and three wars to reach his goal.

Under Wilhelm 1

The Prussian constitution, and the Empire’s, remarked Wilhelm’s biographer, Emil Ludwig, “were a tissue of contradictions.” Responsibility moved from King to Chancellor-Premier, and then “back on the King, until in the inextricable meshes it disappeared once and for all. Actually no one in Prussia or in Germany was responsible in the democratic sense which today prevails in all European countries. In very truth, the Emperor King was absolute,” said Ludwig, the only limit on his authority the right of the Houses to deny supplies. Undoubtedly the German constitutional labyrinth, by the opportunities it offered for evading democratic controls, exposed its rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the anachronistic temptations of eighteenth-century autocracy.

It was in the mess room, with his Prussian fellow officers, that young Hohenzollern felt happiest — in the mess room or on the parade ground riding at the head of his regiment. One of his proudest memories was standing, at the age of eighteen, in front of the old Emperor in the newly conferred mantle of the Most Noble Company of the Black Eagle, swearing to “maintain the honour of the Royal House, and to guard the Royal privileges.”

Wilhelm II

Wilhelm had the theory that most of humanity’s progress was the work of ten great geniuses specially chosen by God for the purpose: Hammurabi, Moses, Abraham, Homer, Charlemagne, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kant and Kaiser Wilhelm I. There is little doubt that he considered himself as belonging to the same select company.

As his official biographer, Joachim von Kuerenberg, points out, the Kaiser was always careful to write both “Sein” (His), with reference to the Deity, and “Mein” (My), in alluding to himself, with capital letters. “This morning the All-Highest paid his respects to the Highest,” the Court Circular is alleged to have reported one Sunday. Wilhelm not only professed the anachronistic doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings — in defiance of the German and Prussian Constitutions — but gave it a neoabsolutist twist that sometimes resembled the royal totalitarianism of Louis XIV. “Regis voluntas, supremo, lex” (The King’s will is the highest law), he wrote in the golden-book of Munich’s city hall, during a visit to Bavaria in 1891. “If it should ever come to pass that the City of Berlin revolts against its monarch,” the Kaiser once warned his sullen subjects, “the Guards will avenge with their bayonets the disobedience of a people to its King.”

Full of himself

Before 1870 Germany had been primarily an agricultural region; by 1914 it had become an industrial power on a level with Great Britain or the United States. Here is a contemporary description of the great Krupp works at Essen, the spearhead of German economic might: “... a great city within a city, with its own streets, its own police force, fire department and traffic laws. There are 150 kilometres of rail, 60 different factory buildings, 8500 machine tools, seven electrical stations, 140 km. of underground cables and 46 overhead. More than 41,000 workers are employed there.” The sole owner of this vast concern — the most important supplier of artillery and other weapons to the German Army — was Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the head of a dynasty whose role in shaping the nation’s destiny sometimes seemed second only to that of the Hohenzollerns. At the Essen works and in his other enterprises Krupp employed a total of 78,334 men and women. The great German industrial barons displayed in some respects more social sense than those contemporary “malefactors of great wealth” in the United States whom Teddy Roosevelt had castigated; at least they had accepted without too much grumbling Bismarck’s paternalistic version of the welfare state, which had made the Prussian worker the most privileged — from a material viewpoint — in Europe.

The most important ones were the Pan-German League, the Colonial Society, and, above all, the Navy League — backed of course by the maritime and armaments lobbies — which both exploited and were exploited by the Secretary of the Navy Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. This fateful personage, a tall, thick-set, overbearing Prussian with a flowing two-pronged beard, became the dominant figure in the German government for some years after 1897. He had little difficulty in convincing the Kaiser that a great navy was essential to a great power, and with the All-Highest’s blessing launched the patriotic societies on an intensive propaganda campaign to make the nation conscious of the need for one. In time, as A. J. P. Taylor remarks, “the demagogic organizations of imperialism took the government prisoner.” The Navy League’s slogan, “Our Future lies on the water,” resulted in the top-heavy Navy bill of 1900 which set the nation’s helm straight for war. Thanks to Tirpitz and his friends, the Kaiser, before he fully realized it, found himself saddled with a policy that could hardly fail to turn England — the only uncommitted great power in Europe — into a mortal enemy, thus completing Germany’s encirclement.

Wilhelm’s attitudes toward England resembled those of certain anti-British Americans, and it was significant that he usually got along better with Americans, despite their deplorable breeziness and familiarity, and their misguided ideas about democracy, than he did with British aristocrats. After the brush with President Theodore Roosevelt over some German muscle-flexing off the Venezuelan coast in 1903, the Kaiser developed a warm admiration for the wielder of the Big Stick, about whom he later said, “Of all the men I’ve known he showed the strongest moral courage.”

For the first time, the most submissive public opinion in Europe revolted. One irreverent German cartoonist even went so far as to portray the Old Emperor, Wilhelm I, trying to intercede with the Almighty on behalf of his grandson on the grounds that it was due to the Divine Grace, after all, that he sat on the throne (an allusion to one of the Kaiser’s famous speeches). “Now you want to put the blame on me,” God replies.

Their influence on the Kaiser was reinforced by the support of the Crown Prince until the Emperor grew jealous of his oldest son and sent him into virtual banishment after 1912. The heir to the Imperial throne, nicknamed the windhund — greyhound — because of his lean, aristocratic good looks, was a steadier and more responsible person than his father, but his political outlook was close to that of the most irresponsible Pan-Germanists and Big Navy fanatics. He had published writings stressing the moral wholesomeness of war and had denounced the ideal of universal peace as an “un-German monstrosity.”

but he had something that Russia in those days needed far more than deep or original ideas: character. It was Stolypin who, in the teeth of criticism both from the left and from the reactionaries, gave Russian peasants the right to withdraw from the village communes and to own their own land — the most fundamental social reform since the emancipation of the serfs. By 1914 nearly 9,000,000 peasant families were tilling their own fields in Russia, and the embers of revolution were fast dying out in the countryside. If anyone could have saved the Russian monarchy after 1905 it was Stolypin.

Peter stolypin

To the politically sophisticated eye of the 1960s there is something vaguely unsatisfactory about the surviving photographs of Gregory Efimovich Rasputin. They usually depict a sturdy man of medium height wearing a peasant blouse or caftan, baggy trousers and heavy boots. He has a coarse, fleshy nose, long, brown, not-very-well-combed hair, parted in the middle, and a wiry, unkempt beard, so dark as to be almost black. He is staring hypnotically into the camera, with enormous, deep-set Ancient Mariner eyes. (Contemporary memoirs describe them as being of a piercing steely blue, with pupils that contracted to pinpoints when their owner was concentrating.) The general impression is of a genuine rascal who is inexplicably going out of his way to look like one.

Stolypins rival

The future starets was born in 1 872 in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoe, near Tobolsk, just beyond the Urals. His father, Efim, was a farmer and a horse dealer. The family, like many peasant families in Russia, had no surname; eventually Gregory adopted the legal name Novyk. “Rasputin” was a nickname given him as a young man by his neighbors. It means “the dissolute,” and there is every reason to suppose that it was well earned. From earliest adolescence Rasputin manifested exceptionally strong sexual urges and powers.

Instead of a monk, Rasputin became a strannik. He twice made the traditional pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and he wandered all over Russia, praying at its most noted shrines.

In 1903 Rasputin, then thirty-one, arrived in St, Petersburg and set himself up as a reformed drunkard and rake. He had already acquired a wife and three children, but he had left them behind in Siberia and he was gaunt and ascetic-looking from his wanderings. His phenomenal filth, his verminous rags and his burning eyes attested the sincerity of his repentance. He was accepted as a kind of hanger-on in a fashionable theological academy, and soon found himself some influential sponsors. They included Hermogen, the Bishop of Saratov, and a monk named Illiodor, who was regarded as a pious mystic in certain drawing rooms of the capital.

Introducing Rasputin to the Czar and the Czarina was probably the idea of the Grand Duchess Militsa, though it seems to have been her brother-in-law the Grand Duke Nicholas who made the actual arrangements. It was the first of numerous attempts by various schemers to build up Rasputin’s influence in order to extend their own. The Imperial couple’s in-grown family life constituted a kind of magic palisade that sheltered them from the normal intrigues of an autocratic Court, but their tragic obsession with the little Czarevitch’s health — along with their ignorance and superstition — rendered them abnormally vulnerable to quackery, especially to quackery in pious dress.

He supplemented them on occasion with secret Tibetan remedies borrowed from a fellow quack, and for a time he took lessons from a professional hypnotist. The Czarina, of course, was unaware of these earthly expedients: to her mind Rasputin’s success in treating the Czarevitch was miraculous; only saints could perform miracles; obviously, therefore, the starets was a saint. The Czar was inclined to agree with her.

Rasputin, whose own lust for power was the most unbridled of his passions, told the Czar exactly what he wanted to hear. Speaking as a man of God, he declared that the autocracy — just as Pobedonostev had taught — was a Divinely ordained institution for whose maintenance Nicholas would be held accountable before the Supreme Judge. Speaking as a man of the people, he affirmed that the muzhiks revered their autocrat and were unconditionally devoted to the autocracy, while they had nothing but loathing or contempt for the revolutionaries and reformers of every stripe. Consequently it was expedient as well as lawful for the Czar to disregard the constitution and put the clock back to the untrammeled absolutism of his father’s day. This doctrine of despotic populism, or progress through reaction — the political analogue of Rasputin’s private dogma of salvation through sin — had a tonic effect on Nicholas’ morale, but it was the most dangerous intellectual drug that could have been prescribed for him.

“... listen to me, which means Our Friend [Rasputin],” Alexandra puts it in one of her letters to the Czar. “... only believe more in Our Friend,” she urges in another. “Be the boss,” she writes in still another. “Obey your firm little wife and Our Friend.” Finally there is this revelatory gem of conjugal prose: “Ah! my Boy, my Boy, how I wish we were together ... think more of Gr. [Rasputin] ... Oh! Let me guide you more.” The letters from which these quotations are taken were written during the war when the weird triangular relationship had assumed its final form.

Russian czarist wife to rasputin

On the practical level Anna’s chief function was to act as a liaison agent between the Czarina and Rasputin; the starets could not appear at the palace every day, but Anna could and did; thanks to her a continuous two-way communication was established. When a face-to-face conference was necessary out of normal visiting hours Alexandra could meet Rasputin at Anna’s house. She was useful in other ways. There were a certain number of down-to-earth requests or suggestions — particularly those relating to the starets’ personal finances — that Rasputin could not make without stepping out of his other-worldly role. Anna made them for him. There is reason to believe that she likewise prompted Rasputin at times to tell the Czarina what — for purposes of husband management — the latter wanted to hear him say.

Not content with influencing state policy at the highest level, Rasputin and the Czarina eventually created a huge political organization, to implement their will. Like all such machines from the precinct or courthouse level up, this unofficial “Empress’s Party” operated on a basis of patronage and favors.

Count Sergius Witte, the Prime Minister at the time of the 1905 uprising was one of the shrewd political minds behind it. A senior police official named Stephen Beletsky, who for a while was one of the key figures in the band, put Rasputin on the secret payroll of the Okhrana for a salary of 3000 rubles a month — about $800 — and with the Czarina’s authorization assigned an Okhrana general to supervise the starets’ personal bodyguard.

When a major appointment or a fat contract for one of the machine’s supporters was at stake he would concentrate on the tactical problem with the aid of several bottles of Madeira — his favorite drink — take a steam bath and then write himself a memo and put it under his pillow (before he learned to write he had used a notched stick as an aide-memoire). In the morning he would pick up the memo, declare, “My will has prevailed,” and telephone Anna Vyrubova to inform the Czarina, who would then give the necessary instructions to the Czar.

Neither the Czarina nor even the prudish Anna Vyrubova — though the latter often witnessed the beginning of some queer evening entertainments at Rasputin’s — could be brought to believe, or at least to admit, that the starets ever behaved like anything but a saint “Read the Apostles; they kissed everybody as a form of greeting,” declared Alexandra in refuting the scandalous tales about her favorite. When the Czarevitch’s nurse accused Rasputin of having seduced her the Czarina dismissed it as an hysterical delusion.

The virile and healthy minded Prime Minister was untouched by the morbid fascination which the starets exercised upon many otherwise sensible Russians of both sexes. He had bluntly rejected a suggestion from the Czar that Rasputin be called in as a healer for Stolypin’s daughter, who had been injured by the explosion of a bomb thrown at her father in 1906, and later on when Rasputin sought an interview and tried to hypnotize him, his mind was made up. Early in 1911, on the strength of police reports about Rasputin’s malversations and misbehavior, Stolypin ordered him out of the capital. The Czar was unhappy and the Czarina raged, but the order stood and Rasputin went into exile. Stolypin’s action, of course, turned Alexandra into one of his mortal enemies.

As the Prime Minister drove the streets of the town behind the Imperial carriage, Rasputin, it is said, suddenly called out “Death is after him! Death is driving behind him.” The next night, Stolypin was shot down by a terrorist in the local opera house, under the eyes of the Czar and of his two eldest daughters. It was to prove one of the most fateful political crimes in modern history — in part because it removed the only serious stumbling block in Rasputin’s path — but it provides a somewhat double-edged argument to historians who believed in the unqualified primacy of the individual leader as the ultimate molder of history. It is true that the history of Russia, and therefore of the world, might have been very different if Stolypin had lived longer.

The name “Bolshevik” dates back to a congress of the Russian Social Democratic party (composed of revolutionary Marxists) held in London in 1903. The faction headed by Lenin — who after a term of prison and banishment to Siberia had escaped to Western Europe in 1900 — won a majority (in Russian, bolshinstvo) on every major issue under discussion.

earnest Russian Marxists these were grave and fundamental options; the bitterness generated by the division of opinion over them was aggravated by the fact that while Lenin won over a majority of the delegates who had been able to reach London, his main opponents, the Mensheviks (minority) undoubtedly represented a majority of the party as a whole. A third body in Russian Marxism, an organization of Jewish Social Democrats called the Bund, stood close to the Menshevik position.

Whether in Munich, Geneva, London, Paris, or Zurich, Lenin’s life was as bourgeois as his appearance. Weekdays he studied in some library or wrote; on Sunday he and his wife, Nadejda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, bicycled in the suburbs or strapped on rucksacks and went for long walks in the country. Occasionally Lenin indulged in a game of chess with some friend at a neighborhood cafe,