Text of that Day’s Editorial, titled “The ex-Tsar Nicholas”
Last Tuesday the ex-Tsar NICHOLAS was shot at Ekaterinburg, in the Urals, by order of the local Soviet. He was not given even the formality of a drum-head court-martial. The pretext was the danger that he might fall into the hands of the Czecho-Slovaks, but as it was possible to remove the rest of his family it was clearly possible to remove him also to a safe place. Even revolutionary violence has its conventions of decency, but they get as little respect in Russia to-day as most other conventions. The crime is as stupid as it is brutal, for the slaying of the ex-Tsar removes no danger to the Soviet regime, while it brings one nearer. The ex-Tsar has powerful kinsmen in Germany; Germany has in her hands the most plausible candidate for the succession; a movement, of which the discussions with Russian Cadet leaders is one symptom, is brewing to divert German policy against the Soviet Government. Moscow cannot afford this new complication, which is evidently not welcomed there. But this belongs to the future, if not the distant future.
NICHOLAS’s wretched end was of a piece with his life. His reign began with the ghastly tragedy at his coronation, when thousands of peasants lost their lives in the struggle for some mugs. Its middle term was the disastrous Russo-Japanese War, with its revolutionary sequel. Its close was the catastrophic European War, which has cast down the throne and the Empire of the Romanoffs. He saw before his death the utter undoing of all the labours of his House during three centuries. It would be difficult to gather out of the records of history a completer tale of disaster crammed into so few years. The constitutional creed of his dynasty and himself was autocracy, so he must accept the legal or theoretical responsibility for this cataclysm. At no point or stage is there any hint or suggestion of any statesmanship on his part to avert it. Was he not merely the witness of and the seal upon so much error, folly, and ruin, or was he a principal architect of his own and his country’s misfortunes? Observers differ in their judgements.
Some pronounced him a mere echo of the last voice in his ears; others saw him actively malevolent. Probably he was in most things passive, and only occasionally the instigator. But he never had a good idea of his own, and never held by a good idea offered to him. Nobody felt gratitude towards him, still less respect, and although less than eighteen months ago he was Tsar of All the Russias, at his death he seemed a relic of a very remote barbaric antiquity. The whole system of government of which in Russia he was the last representative has, it is to be hoped, seen its last months in Europe. Assuredly this war will have failed of one of its chief justifications if absolutism in its more refined or its less refined forms still cumbers the western earth when the peace settlement is made.
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