Through the keyhole
Norman Stone
An Ambassador's Memoirs. Maurice Paleologue, translated by F. A. Holt, introduced by Professor L. B. Schairo (Hutchinson E12.00).
Maurice Paleologue was ambassador of France in the last days of Tsarist Russia. He served from just before 1914 until just after the Revolution had begun. His memoirs — a very large work, in the form of a diary — have for long been an important source for historians, for he was well-informed of the various currents in the Tsarist government and recorded a great deal in his diary. Unfortunately, the version he prepared for publication was retouched , such that there is often no telling how much is genuine. Paleologue himself was an untrustworthy character. His colleagues disliked him as such: his own military attache, the Marquis de Laguiche, told everyone he would much prefer to serve under Sir George
Buchanan, the British Ambassador, a model of correctness resembling Dickens's Refrigerator. He would not even have a telep-bone in case Paleologue rang: "I am not a lackey to be summoned by a bell." Paleologue was in the habit of hinting that he owed his name to the Palaeologus dynasty, where it came in reality from Levantine traders established in the south of France for a generation or two. He was a characteristic Third Republic appointment, in fact: treading the careeropen-to-talent path and expecting his equivalent of a Habsburg Archduchess at the end of it. As a result, his point of view was peculier: he was not really accepted by the beau monde, and at the same time had lost contact with the popular world from which he came. Despite the grandeur of his official position, Paleologue remained irremediably a keyhole Creevey of Tsarist Russia.
The world of Nicholas II's court was, to him, an object of immense fascination. In his memoirs, there is hardly a piece of fantastic gossip that remains unrecorded. For instance:
They are also whispering that the Grand Duchess Tatiana, the Emperor's second daughter, witnessed the drama [of Rasputin's murder] disguised as a lieutenant of the Chevalier-Guards, so that she could revenge herself on Rasputin, who had tried to violate her. And carrying the vindictive ferocity of the mouzhik into the world of the Court, they add that to satiate her thirst for vengeance the dying Rasputin was castrated before before her eyes." Paleologue's reporting remains a curious mixture of Tin-Tin and Paris-Match, and there are times when the historian can only boggle that men of this triviality were appointed to important positions by the great powers of Europe. The diary records above all the currents of gossip that went through the higher circles of Saint Petersburg the tales of the Tsaritsa's links with German agents, Rasputin, the clutch of homosexual journalists that ran between high-Church activities, ministries, the enemy. The millions of Russians who made the Revolution are virtually ignored; they appear only towards the end, to the writer's evident distress. The memoirs discuss the popular movement towards revolution only in terms of national character; otherwise, they are taken up almost exclusively with the affairs of the government and the Court.
These affairs were of course fantastic enough. The Tsar himself had an almost uncanny want of judgement, at least when observed from a rational point of view. He was often quite lost even for the simplest of formulas, and lacked the common touch that more successful monarchies have fostered. For instance, when General de Castelnau came to Russia on official business, the Tsar had no idea what to say to him: "He seemed to have no idea of his eminent services to Fiance, and could not find a word to say about his three sons killed in battle." His tone with subordinates was of the Allez, manants variety, an unerring ability to alienate support that recalls the finest exploits of Charles X. The functioning of the Russian Government remained a closed book to almost all of the foreign observers; and western diplomats were no exception. They recorded with stupefaction what happened, and could never account for it. except in terms of Russia's national character. Yet, in a strange. way, the Government's behaviour made sense in Russian terms. For instance, the respectable liberals associated with the Duna, and in the end with the Provisional Government, seemed from the Tsar's viewpoint merely a gang of incompetent profiteers, stirring up trouble for nothing except their own narrow intersts. It was understanable that a man like Paleologue, lunching and dining with liberals every day, should have failed to gain this perspective altogether, and to assume, for instance, that the industrialists and liberals could do more for the war-effort than the Tsarist Government allowed them to do. In practice; the activities of these men went largely to provoke a class-conflict that Tsarism could, at least to some degree, overcome. In all probability, Paleologue's memoirs, with all their vastness, gossip and widespread use, reveal more about the Third Republic than they do about Tsarist Russia.
Norman Stone is Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He lectures on Russian and Austro-Hungarian history.
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