



Produced by David Thomas






 [IMAGE: img000.jpg The Tsar Nicholas II]

 THE ROMANCE
 _of the_
 ROMANOFFS

 BY
 JOSEPH McCABE


 _ILLUSTRATED_

 NEW YORK
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
 1917

 Copyright, 1917,
 By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. Inc.



PREFACE

THE history of Russia has attracted many writers and inspired many
volumes during the last twenty years, yet its most romantic and most
interesting feature has not been fully appreciated.

Thirteen years ago, when the long struggle of the Russian democrats
culminated in a bloody revolution, I had occasion to translate into
English an essay written by a learned professor who belonged to what was
called “the Russophile School.” It was a silken apology for murder. The
Russian soul, the writer said, was oriental, not western. The true line
of separation of east and west was, not the great ridge of mountains
which raised its inert barrier from the Caspian Sea to the frozen ocean,
but the western limit of the land of the Slavs. In their character the
Slavs were an eastern race, fitted only for autocratic rule, indifferent
to those ideas of democracy and progress which stirred to its muddy
depths the life of western Europe. They loved the “Little Father.” They
clung, with all the fervour of their mild and peaceful souls, to their
old-world Church. They had the placid wisdom of the east, the health
that came of living close to mother-earth, the tranquillity of
ignorance. Was not the Tsar justified in protecting his people from the
feverish illusions which agitated western Europe and America?

Thus, in very graceful and impressive language, wrote the “sound”
professors, the clients of the aristocracy, the more learned of the
silk-draped priests. The Russia which they interpreted to us, the Russia
of the boundless horizon, could not read their works. It was almost
wholly illiterate. It could not belie them. Indeed, if one could have
interrogated some earth-bound peasant among those hundred and twenty
millions, he would have heard with dull astonishment that he had _any_
philosophy of life. His cattle lived by instinct: _his_ path was traced by
the priest and the official.

But the American onlooker found one fatal defect in the Russophile
theory. These agents of the autocracy contended that the soul of Russia
rejected western ideas; yet they were spending millions of roubles every
year, they were destroying hundreds of fine-minded men and women every
year, they were packing the large jails of Russia until they reeked with
typhus and other deadly maladies, in an effort to keep those ideas away
from the Russian soul. While Russophile professors were penning their
plausible theories of the Russian character, the autocracy which they
defended was being shaken by as brave and grim a revolution as
any that has upset thrones in modern Europe. Moscow, the shrine of this
supposed beautiful docility, was red with the blood of its children. In
the jails and police-cells of Russia about 200,000 men and women, boys
and girls, quivered under the lash or sank upon fever-beds, and almost
as many more dragged out a living death in the melancholy wastes of
Siberia. They wanted democracy and progress; and their introduction of
those ideas to the peasantry had awakened so ready and fervent a
response that it had been necessary to seal their lips with blood.

We looked back along the history of Russia, and we found that the
struggle was nearly a century old. The ghastly route to Siberia had been
opened eighty years before. Russia had felt the revolutionary wave which
swept over Europe during the thirties of the nineteenth century, and the
Tsar of those days had fought not less savagely than the rulers of
Austria, Spain, and Portugal for his autocracy. Every democratic advance
that has since been won in western Europe has provoked a corresponding
effort to advance in Russia, and that effort has always been truculently
suppressed. Nearly every other country in Europe has had the courage to
educate its people and enable them to study its institutions with open
mind. Russia remains illiterate to the extent of seventy-five per cent,
and its rulers have ever discouraged or restricted education. The
autocracy rested, not upon the affection, but upon the ignorance, of its
people.

When we regard the whole history of that autocracy we begin to
understand the tragedy of Russia. We dimly but surely perceive, in the
dawn of European history, that amongst the families which wandered
through the forests of Europe none were more democratic than, few were
as democratic as, the early Slavs. We find this great family spread over
an area so immense that it is further encouraged to cling to democratic,
even communistic, life, and avoid the making of princes or kings. We
then find the inevitable military chiefs, not born of the Slav people,
intruding and creating princedoms: we find an oriental autocracy
fastening itself, violently and parasitically, upon the helpless nation:
we find the evil example and the tincture of foreign blood continuing
the development until Princes of Moscow become Tsars of all the Russias,
and convert a title dipped in blood into a title to rule by the grace of
God and