Excerpt from "A Martyr of the Great, Modern Tragedy: Tsar Nicholas II, Part I" by Queen Maria of Romania
From the magazine Revue des Deux Mondes, September 1st, 1919 issue, Vol. 53, No. 1
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From the journal that she kept at the most critical times of the war, Her Majesty the Queen of Romania was kind enough to detach for us these pages of memories written through the shock of emotion, at the news of the death of the one who was until the very end the faithful ally of the Entente. We express our respectful thanks to her. Thus, the first voice to be raised in honour of the unfortunate sovereign will have been that of a lady and a Queen.
Bienz. September, 1918.
Tsar Nicholas is dead! They killed him, shamefully, violently, and without pity; he was at their mercy, and they were afraid that others would come to save him. So one morning, early in the morning, they shot him.
He was no longer a symbol, and when he was just a man, they didn’t want to allow him to be even that.
All his life he would have liked to be only a man — this was his error: a sovereign must be more — and when the time came when he might have been just that, he was killed. We cannot yet have precise details about his death, only contradictory rumours reach us; but what is certain is that he died early one morning, murdered. Such a death deserves no other name. It was a heinous action... and unnecessary. A bloody stain that will forever remain on their hands.
Tsar Nicholas is dead.
He whose voice rang out to a hundred and forty million men with joy or terror, is now dead. He was killed one morning, early, furtively, in secret, like a criminal. His soul went on to present himself to Him for whom kings and beggars are the same. We will never know how he was judged by this King of Kings, but what I am sure of is that Tsar Nicolas, an ardent mystic and a sincere believer, had no fear of appearing before his God.
The world which is indignant at the manner in which he was killed, will not judge him with indulgence. He failed in his task, and when one fails, the world is severe on you. Further, we live in democratic times where those who sit on thrones rarely find favour before their judges.
Yet this man's name alone maintained a great Empire, and no one doubted his power: he symbolised a force in which all believed. But, in an hour of madness, when some visionaries thought they were walking towards the light, this man was suppressed, the symbol destroyed, and with him the unity of the Empire. The great state crumbled. The name of the Tsar was the thread which held together the innumerable beads of the vast rosary of his kingdom; the thread snapped, the beads rolled wildly, and the vast Empire became a thing of the past.
Of the great powers now at war, not one accepts responsibility for his death; they accuse each other of it, each throwing the blame on the other. There again it will be up to the King of Kings alone to judge; but the Tsar is dead and there is no truth on earth that can raise him from his tomb!
It is not as a judge that I want to speak of Tsar Nicolas II, the last sovereign of all the Russias, but as a relative, because, from his blood and his race, I loved him and have known him ever since the happy days of childhood. Cruelly struck personally by the great modern tragedy, I feel the duty to speak with kindness of a man whom I consider a martyr, at this hour when the official world does not yet dare to rise up to defend him.
Is there a fate more tragic than to have possessed everything, to have been as high as a man can be, to have held good and evil in one's hands, — and to have been able to do nothing with all this, from not having known how to be the guide for a whole country that trembled with desire to follow towards the light! To say that he commanded good as well as evil are not empty words here. Of both, the Tsar was truly the master. His name alone electrified millions of beings; he was both a despot, and a symbol, and the head of the church — and also the "little father," mystical and yet familiar being who belonged to all, the lare god of each hearth, raison d'être of the immense Empire!
This power, this true strength which was his, he had when still very young and with his whole life ahead of him to realise his ideal, to seek the light; but in a time when everything moves towards progress, he knew only how to retrograde. There lies the tragic element, there the secret of his failure, his fault, his greatest fault.
Yet Nicholas II had lofty aspirations; he passionately desired the happiness of his vast people; his heart was tender, and his desire was for all that is great and beautiful. If he had been well surrounded, advised by the right men, married to a far-sighted woman, with broad views and modern ideas, if they had pushed him forward instead of pulling him back, he could have gone on to become a magnificent instrument for the good of his people. But it was not to be!
The external circumstances of his life are known, I will not recount them. I would like to evoke more intimate visions, personal memories, images that my eyes have seen, and emotions that my heart has echoed. Our paths did not cross often, but we were closely related, and I have always known him since my early childhood.
My mother was the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II. The Court of Russia was certainly one of the most brilliant in Europe. My mother came from there, and, as far back as I can remember, everything that belonged to this Court assumed in my childish eyes an extraordinary prestige, a particular brilliance, to which no other was comparable. The Tsar was its central figure, as if the whole world had gravitated around him, participating in his mystical existence.
Even today, a kind of superstitious terror seizes me when I evoke the atmosphere which surrounded the Tsar of all the Russias. I see huge palaces, soldiers and courtiers ad infinitum, narrow, silent corridors with guards in bizarre uniforms and, before the doors, giant Cossacks in red robes, wild looking, with bristly veins of pistols and daggers, wearing large fur caps. A special smell reigned in these imperial residences, a bizarre mixture of turpentine and Russian leather, which I found nowhere else.
Lined up in front of the gate, the Court carriages were waiting, with the bearded coachmen, draped in their long coats of blue cotton wool, caressing with their voices the splendid “Orlof” trotters who impatiently scratched the pavement, shaking their long manes, sweeping the ground of their quivering tails: they were generally black, but sometimes their golden sides gleamed like cuirasses polished in the sun, and some were white dappled with gray.
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