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39°
39° A VISIT TO PETROGRAD [chap. xxi.
M. Neidhart since Moscow, when he was a schoolboy
of about twelve or fifteen years of age,1 but I had often
heard him spoken of since as a man of intellect, tact and
merit, who, having been elected a member of the
Council of the Empire, had made himself the head of
an influential group of moderate and intelligent
Conservatives. In the course of an hour of agreeable and
pregnant conversation all business relative to our
work for the prisoners of war was settled with M.
Neidhart; I received the kind promise of a
substantial grant—a promise carried out soon after—and
I left much charmed with his broad and open mind,
and his manner so entirely devoid of Petrograd
" tchinovism."
During the last years of Nicolas II.’s reign there
had been much talk in Petrograd of the possibility
of placing M. Alexis Neidhart at the head of affairs. Me
was a firm Monarchist and a Conservative, b-ut a moderate
Conservative, taking the word in its Western sense, that
is to say completely exempt from that tendency to
despotism and that coarseness of behaviour that
characterise the Russian reactionaries. He and his group,
in that case, would probably have imposed their own
conditions: i.e. they would have demanded the genuine
homogeneousness of the Cabinet, the suppression of
the despotic rights of the State Police, and the frank
acceptation by the Emperor of the constitutional system
for Russia, if not of an integral parliamentarianism.
Moreover, Neidhart and his friends were not the only
people to preach such a programme; they had eminent
seniors and forerunners who sat with them at the
Council of the Empire; these included old M. Andrew
Saburoff, one of the most European and cultivated of
statesmen ; M. Koni, a distinguished philanthropist, and
a ready help in all trouble and in all good causes; M.
Alexis Yermoloff, Minister of Agriculture for a time, a
thorough expert in this primordial branch of the
1 He was the brother of Madame Peter Stolypin ; his other sister
was Madame Sazonoff.
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