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All that is new when the minority attempting to establish its dictatorship is composed of poor, propertyless people, is the fact of their economic condition and status. That is the only difference between the dictatorship of Russia by the Romanov dynasty and the dictatorship of Russia by a small minority of determined, class-conscious working-people.
Nicholas Romanov is to blame for the plight of his country and for his own misfortunes. He was warned, he was given his chances, but he abused them all. When he entered on his reign he was popular and had the good will of his people with him.
He founded several fortified towns in the south against the Tatars and the Turks. He recovered Novgorod from the Swedes. The grandson of Michael Romanov was the celebrated Peter the Great, who may rightfully be designated as the father of modern Russia.
It gathered momentum when, in the days of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Great War extinguished the Romanov, the Hohenzollern, and Hapsburg dynasties, and converted powerful time-honored monarchies into republics. It was further accelerated, soon after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, by the demise of the effete Qájár dynasty in Persia, and the stupendous collapse of both the Sultanate and the Caliphate.
Protopopov and Sturmer and their associates recognized as clearly as the liberals did the natural kinship and interdependence of the three great autocracies, the Romanov, Habsburg, and Hohenzollern dynasties. They knew well that the crushing of autocracy in Austria-Hungary and Germany would make it impossible to maintain autocracy in Russia.
Exactly as the Ministers of Nicholas Romanov after the suppressions said "Lie. Lie," so cried the Bolsheviki and the Revolutionary Socialists of the Left, in response to the question formally put on the subject of the shooting by a member of the Constituent Assembly. The following day the Bolshevik organs and those of the Revolutionary Socialists of the Left passed over these facts in silence.
Swelling the ranks of the ill-fated scions of the House of Uthmán, and of the rulers of the Romanov, the Hohenzollern, the Hapsburg, and the Napoleonic dynasties, they roam the face of the earth, scarcely aware of the character of those forces which have operated such tragic revolutions in their lives, and so powerfully contributed to their present plight.
They wanted the Czar deposed, but the monarchy itself retained, subject to constitutional limitations analogous to those obtaining in England. They wanted the Romanov dynasty retained, their choice being the Czar's brother, Grand-Duke Michael. The representatives of the Soviet, on the other hand, would not tolerate the suggestion that the monarchy be continued.
Peter III., son of a Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, is a Romanov in the proportion of one-half; Paul, son of a Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, in the proportion of one-fourth; Alexander I. and Nicholas I., sons of a Princess of Würtemberg, in the proportion of one-eighth; Alexander II., son of a Princess of Hohenzollern, to the extent of one-sixteenth; Alexander III., son of a Grand Duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt, to the extent of one thirty-second; and the late ruler, Nicholas II., who married a Princess of the House of Oldenburg, to the extent of one sixty-fourth.
Such a development could not fail, they believed, to have the most disastrous consequences for Russia. Inevitably, it would add to German prestige and power in the Russian Empire, and weld together the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Romanov autocracies in a solid, reactionary mass, which, under the efficient leadership of Germany, might easily dominate the entire world.
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