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"What else could you expect of that Hun?" Paliser concluded. "A Hun!" Cassy exclaimed. "Why he is a Romanov." "No more than you are," Paliser replied. "The last of the Romanovs married Catherine the Greater. There the breed ended. Paul, who followed and who married a German drab, was Catherine's son but not her husband's.
In all the bloody pages of the history of the Romanovs there is nothing comparable to the frightful terror of this period. Naturally, this brutal vengeance and the deception which Nicholas II and his advisers had practised upon the people had the immediate effect of increasing the relative strength and prestige of the Socialists in the revolutionary movement as against the less radical elements.
Foiled at the Court of Petersburg, Napoleon was more successful at the Court of Vienna. A few months after Napoleon’s last overtures had been rejected by Russia, the Habsburgs, who, after the Bourbons, were the most august, the most ancient dynasty of Europe, eagerly accepted what the Romanovs had refused. The war of 1812 with Russia was the result of that pro-German policy of the Russian Court.
Passing over his feeble son, we come to the era of Boris Godunov, a man in many respects remarkable, but not the least that he saw the necessity of western culture. His plans for educating Russia were extensive, and several youths were sent abroad for this purpose, including some to England. The Romanovs finally ascended the throne in the person of Michael in 1613.
Madame Radek, who last year showed a genius for the making of sandwiches with chopped leeks, and did good work for Russia as head of the Committee for dealing with Russian war prisoners, came and sat down beside me, and complained bitterly that the authorities wanted to turn her out of the grand ducal apartments in the Kremlin and make them into a historical museum to illustrate the manner of life of the Romanovs.
The hated Romanov dynasty was ended at last. It is not likely that Grand-Duke Michael entertained the faintest hope that he would ever be called to the throne, either by a Constituent Assembly or by a popular referendum. Not only was the Romanov dynasty ended, but equally so was monarchical Absolutism itself. No other dynasty would replace that of the Romanovs.
On the Russian sovereigns: R. N. Bain, The First Romanovs, 1613-1725 , and, by the same author, Pupils of Peter the Great: a History of the Russian Court and Empire from 1697 to 1740 ; Eugene Schuyler, Peter the Great, 2 vols. , a scholarly work; Kazimierz Waliszewski, Peter the Great, an admirable study trans. from the French by Lady Mary Loyd , and, by the same author, though not as yet translated, L'heritage de Pierre le Grand: regne des femmes, gouvernement des favoris, 1725-1741 and La derniere des Romanov, Elisabeth R ; Alexander Bruckner, Peter der Grosse , and, by the same author, Katharina die Zweite , important German works, in the Oncken Series; E. A. B. Hodgetts, The Life of Catherine the Great of Russia , a recent fair-minded treatment in English.
While in some respects, such as this terrible savagery, Bolshevism has out-Heroded Herod and surpassed the régime of the Romanovs in cruel oppression, upon the whole its methods have been very like that of the latter. There is really not much to choose between the ways of Stolypin and Von Plehve and those of the Lenine-Trotzky rule.
In their place appeared as great world powers the northern monarchies of Prussia and Russia, whose royal lines Hohenzollerns and Romanovs were to vie in ambition and prowess, before the close of the period, with Habsburgs and Bourbons. Socially, the influence of nobles and clergy steadily declined.
The testimony comes from Socialist sources of the utmost reliability, much of it from official Bolshevist sources. The system of oppression it describes is twin brother to that which existed under the Romanovs, to end which hundreds of thousands of the noblest and best of our humankind gave up their lives.
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