Nicholas and Alexandra Read Online Free PDF Page B

balding man with coldly ascetic eyes staring out through steel-rimmed glasses, he first came to prominence when as a jurist at Moscow University he wrote a celebrated three-volume text on Russian law. He became a tutor to the children of Tsar Alexander II, and, as a young man, Alexander III was his faithful, believing pupil. When Alexander mounted the throne, Pobedonostsev already held the office of Procurator of the Holy Synod, or lay head of the Russian Orthodox Church. In addition, he assumed the tutorship of the new Tsarevich, Nicholas.
    Pobedonostsev's brilliant mind was steeped in nationalism and bigotry. He took a misanthropic Hobbesian view of man in general. Slavs in particular he described as sluggish and lazy, requiring strong leadership, while Russia, he said, was "an icy desert and an abode of the 'Bad Man.' " Believing that national unity was essential to the survival of this sprawling, multi-racial empire, he insisted on the absolute authority of Russia's two great unifying institutions: the autocracy and the Orthodox Church. He insisted that opposition to them be ruthlessly crushed. He opposed all reforms, which he called "this whole bazaar of projects . . . this noise of cheap and shallow ecstasies." He regarded a constitution as "a fundamental evil," a free press as an "instrument of mass corruption" and universal suffrage as "a fatal error." But most of all Pobedonostsev hated parliaments.
    "Among the falsest of political principles," he declared, "is the principle of the sovereignty of the people . . . which has unhappily infatuated certain foolish Russians. . . . Parliament is an institution serving for the satisfaction of the personal ambition, vanity, and self-interest of its members. The institution of Parliament is indeed one of the greatest illustrations of human delusion. . . . Providence has preserved our Russia, with its heterogeneous racial composition, from like misfortunes. It is terrible to think of our condition if
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    destiny had sent us the fatal gift—an all-Russian Parliament. But that will never be."
    For the same reason, and from his special position as—in effect— Minister of Religion, Pobedonostsev attacked all religious strains in Russia unwilling to be assimilated into Orthodoxy. Those who most strenuously resisted, he hated most. He was violently anti-Semitic and declared that the Jewish problem in Russia would be solved only when one third of Russia's Jews had emigrated, one third had been converted to Orthodoxy and one third had disappeared. It was the pupil of Pobedonostsev speaking in Alexander III when he wrote in the margin of a report depicting the plight of Russian Jewry in 1890, "We must not forget that it was the Jews who crucified our Lord and spilled his precious blood."
    Pobedonostsev's virulent prejudice was not restricted to Jews. He also attacked the Catholic Poles and the Moslems scattered across the broad reaches of the empire. It was Pobedonostsev who wrote the document excommunicating Leo Tolstoy in 1901.*
    The Russia described to Nicholas by Pobedonostsev had nothing to do with the restless giant stirring outside the palace windows. Instead, it was an ancient, stagnant, coercive land made up of the classical triumvirate of Tsar, Church and People. It was God, the tutor explained, who had chosen the Tsar. There was no place in God's design for representatives of the people to share in ruling the nation. Turning Pobedonostsev's argument around, a tsar who did not rule as an autocrat was failing his duty to God. Heard as a school lesson, the old man's teaching may have lacked a basis in reality, but it had the compelling purity of logic, and Nicholas eagerly accepted it.
    For Nicholas, the most dramatic proof of Pobedonostsev's teachings against the dangers of liberalism was the brutal assassination of his grandfather, Alexander II, the most liberal of Russia's nineteenth-century tsars. For his historic freeing of the serfs, Alexander II was known as the