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Updated: June 20, 2025
After the disasters of 1612, all the ancient plate for the service of the Tsar's table was melted down and converted into money; many objects in gold and silver and jewelled work being at the same time given in pledge to the troops of Vladislas IV. There are therefore few examples earlier than the dynasty of the Romanoffs.
Such a letter as this I have here given seems utterly incredible in this twentieth century, yet those who knew underground Russia immediately before the downfall of the Romanoffs will express no surprise.
The summer of 1807 saw the social triumph of the Bonaparte family, the sometime Jacobins, but now emperor and kings. Jerome Napoleon was married on August twenty-second to the Princess Catherine of Würtemberg. The Emperor had already spoken at Tilsit with the Czar about unions for himself and family suitable to their rank, but the hint of an alliance with the Romanoffs was coldly received.
We must now pass quickly over many things. The motto of the Romanoffs might be taken from Macbeth: "The near in blood, the nearer bloody." But in that sombre history there is no darker page than the conspiracy of 1762. In January Elizabeth died and the Grand Duke ascended the throne, quietly enough, as Peter III. But the position of Catharine was worse than before.
If Soltikoff, as Catharine implies, were the father of her son Paul, the sovereigns who have since occupied the throne of Russia are Romanoffs only in name. From this point till her death, in 1796, she entirely ignored the code of morality convenient in a society whose basis is the family.
While Rasputin, having thrown off his cloak of piety, was leading a dissolute life in far-off Pokrovsky, and refusing to obey the Empress's repeated invitations, the guns of Peter and Paul one day boomed forth salvo after salvo, announcing to the world that the prayer uttered by the Starets before our Lady of Kazan had been granted. An heir had been born to the Romanoffs!
That night the salon of the Countess Ignatieff was responsible for much concerning the downfall of the Romanoffs. In the great luxurious drawing-room there were assembled beneath the huge crystal electroliers a curious, mixed company of the pious and the vicious of the capital.
This illiterate Siberian monk, ex-horse-thief and betrayer of women, actually disregarded the Imperial order! He had declared himself to be the saviour of Russia, and greater than the Romanoffs. "The Empress is furious!" declared the Bishop Teofan one day as, with his heavy bejewelled cross upon his breast and wearing clothes of the richest texture, he sat with the rascal in his den.
It was introducing a principle which had been condemned, and was a veiled attempt to undo the work of the Ivans and the Romanoffs, and to place the real power as of old in the hands of ruling families. The plan fell, and the leaders fell with it, and a host of their followers. The executioners were busy at St. Petersburg, and the aristocratic colony in Siberia grew larger.
It was the Hohenzollerns and the Romanoffs, the firebrands of the French Cabinet, and your own clumsy, thick-headed efforts to get the best of everybody and yet keep your Nonconformist conscience. The people did not make this war, but it is the people who are going to end it."
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