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284
ON THE EVE OF WAR [chap. xvr.
am still wondering whence this optimism drew its source,
when the whole of Europe was seized with indubitable
uneasiness, and when in Russia herself the awful
rumbling of the revolution, checked but not settled, had been
heard since 1906?
Yes, the revolution was always present, extending
its roots over the soil of Russia. We diplomats working
abroad might have been mistaken about it; but how could
those who in St. Petersburg directed Russian politics
and were in daily contact with the terrible reality have
failed to realise it in all they did and schemed?
In one of the early chapters of these reminiscences,
I sketched one of the causes of this phenomenon. 1
said that since Stolypin’s disappearance the foreign
policy of Russia had been almost completely divorced
from the home policy. But there was more in it than
that. At the period when the terrible, world-wide
conflict occurred, the Russian "Cabinet" had assumed an
aspect as strange as it was glaring. There were two
parties who had nothing in common and who quarrelled
mutually. On one side, the " reactionaries " : MM.
Mak-lakoff, Casso, Makaroff, Sabler, Prince Schakhowskoi,
and to a certain extent the President of the Council,
M. Goremykin; on the other, the sincere partisans of
indispensable reforms : chiefly MM. Sazonoff and
Krivochei’n. The reactionary Ministers discerned very
clearly—far more clearly than their colleagues—the
dangers of the internal position of the country ; only, to
obviate them, they vaunted and made use of methods
which only increased the general discontent and the
nervous tension of the country; and in order to retain
their places and cause their system to triumph, some of
those gentlemen were not ashamed to flatter the vile
Rasputin, and to protect his most intimate friends.1
The Ministers belonging to the opposite camp realised
exactly what ought to be done : that is to say, to proceed
to immediate reforms, to adopt truly the representative
1 M. Goremykin and M. Casso, fortunately for their reputations, never
compromised themselves by these degrading attentions.
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