Chapter 14: Unable to Live Without Me

Soaking in the bathtub, Nicholas II wore a truly complicated expression.

He looked pleased, and burdened, and like he wanted to run away from it all, all at once.

-Probably all three, right? That’s just how Nicholas II is.

The longer one knows a man, the better he’s supposed to look; so why did my old man’s stock keep dropping by the day?

Not that it could be helped.

This was a man who brought official documents into the bathroom and handed them to his 8-year-old son, asking him to read the reports and spot the holes in his stead.

A man who then paraded that achievement proudly before his ministers, playing master detective.

And a man whose every fiber now radiated a desperate wish to avoid anything he might actually have to take responsibility for.

That man was the Emperor of the Russian Empire.

This country… really is going to fall, isn’t it?

But that was strictly a matter for the future; for now, I was Nicholas II’s savior, the very picture of filial devotion.

“Your Majesty, is something worrying you?”

“Oh… Misha, yes. Thanks to you, things have gone very, very well. It seems a few bad men among my subordinates shrank their reports because they wanted to dodge responsibility.”

“Wow… they really are bad people. You’re the Tsar of this nation that God established, and they dared try to deceive you?”

“But Misha, this is a rather complicated matter. If I remove the minister who oversees the entire Ministry of Internal Affairs right this moment….”

The Tsar’s voice trailed off abruptly.

Just as I thought. He’d been agonizing for days on end over what to do with Plehve, the Minister of Internal Affairs.

-That’s the face of a guy who knows damn well he has to fire him but would rather die than do it himself, right?

Nicholas II hated nothing on earth more than having to say something unpleasant to someone’s face.

Delivering a dismissal meant summoning a subordinate, sitting him down, and pronouncing sentence to his face, and this was a man constitutionally incapable of any such thing.

“Your Majesty.”

“…Hm?”

“Are you worrying over whether you have to dismiss that minister?”

Even from behind, I caught the tiny flinch of the Tsar’s shoulders.

Oh, my aching head.

“Well… the situation is a bit complicated, you see.”

“I don’t think you should dismiss him.”

The water sloshed in the tub; he must not have expected that.

“…I shouldn’t?”

“No. Even if that minister really is a bad man, wouldn’t there be total chaos if he left the Ministry of Internal Affairs right now? Even if a new minister came, there’s no telling whether he’d do the job as well as the last one.”

With an extreme avoider like Niki, nothing works better than taking his side with something pleasant to hear.

And above all, keeping the current minister in his seat makes my own planning that much easier.

“Besides, this minister has already been caught by Your Majesty once. But a new man would be someone who hasn’t been caught yet, right? Couldn’t that be even scarier?”

For a long while, there was no sound at all.

The water in the tub had gone still; the Tsar must have stopped moving entirely, chewing something over.

“…Misha. There is certainly something to that.”

No need to go as far as dismissal.

No need for an uncomfortable confrontation.

And since it sounded logically plausible on top of that, of course he’d be tempted.

“Then… what should be done about the men beneath him?”

“Those people are bad men who tried to deceive Your Majesty, so of course they should be punished. The local Governor-General too. Dozens of people died; it would be stranger if the man in charge of the province took no responsibility at all.”

The Tsar’s head slowly began to nod.

“And I think foreign countries probably know about this too. If you handle it quickly, it will look like Your Majesty took immediate action; if it’s late, it will look like Your Majesty stood by and watched.”

-Cut off the tail, keep the minister, but tell him to pack the Ministry of Internal Affairs with people who listen to the Emperor. That’s what widens our room to maneuver.

“…Hmm.”

The Tsar rose from the tub and picked up a towel.

His hands looked noticeably lighter as he dried himself off.

“But you know, Misha, even if you are right, the range of men I can punish over this one incident is limited. Even if I cut away everyone involved in Kishinev, the rest of the working staff will remain, won’t they?”

“Your Majesty, may I ask one thing?”

“Go ahead.”

“Did they start shrinking reports like this under this minister? Or was it always this way, even before him?”

The Tsar’s hand stopped dead as he toweled himself off.

“…I had the Okhrana section chief look into it, and he says it is a customary practice reaching back well before the current minister. Burying anything involving Jews without making a fuss was an unspoken rule, apparently.”

Right. I figured as much.

If our Russian Empire’s reporting system had actually been sound, now that would have been a twist worthy of The Sixth Sense.

“Then, Your Majesty, I think I was right. Even if you remove the minister, the next man will do exactly the same thing. No, he’ll have seen how his predecessor got caught this time, so he’ll be even sneakier, won’t he?”

Get it now?

It means there’s a good chance this doesn’t stop at the Jewish cases.

“But Your Majesty, the really scary part is something else.”

“…There’s more?”

“Don’t you think there must have been other cases like Kishinev? If this is an old practice, then the things that never reached Your Majesty’s eyes can’t number just one or two.”

The face of the Tsar, leaning against the marble wall beside the tub, visibly hardened.

“And the Kishinev case only got caught by luck, because I happened to stumble on it. So what about the ones that haven’t been caught yet?”

-Nice, nice. Very smooth segue.

Of course. This is the whole point.

“The places farthest from Your Majesty’s eyes. The farther away something happens, the easier it is for the reports to get twisted. Kishinev turned out this way because it’s so far from Petersburg.”

The Tsar stood motionless for a long while, staring into space.

The only sound in the bathroom was the drip of water from his damp hair onto the tiled floor.

At last, the Tsar murmured low, as if to himself.

“…Primorye.”

If the Ministry of Internal Affairs had doctored reports just to bury one Jewish incident, then how honest could the reports coming up from the far end of the Far East possibly be?

Nicholas II’s face rapidly began to drain of color.

* * *

Vyacheslav Konstantinovich von Plehve, Minister of Internal Affairs of the great Russian Empire, was bewildered.

Police, public order, censorship, provincial administration.

Until just days ago, every organ that formed the spine of the Empire had been running in the palm of his hand.

Putting a filter on the reports that went up to the Emperor was nothing more than a perfectly routine part of the job.

When something involving Jews blew up, it got quietly covered over.

It was a practice handed down unbroken from his predecessor, no, from his predecessor’s predecessor; he had simply carried it on by inertia.

And then, somehow, out of nowhere, it got caught.

“Minister. His Majesty has learned the true scale of the Kishinev incident.”

When Police Department Director Lopukhin delivered that report, closer to a notification than a briefing, cold sweat streamed down Plehve’s spine.

“How… how on earth?”

“We do not know. Only that Okhrana Section Chief Yakov went down to the scene in person on His Majesty’s orders.”

Strange. The Tsar? That Nicholas II gave the order personally?

Plehve’s brow furrowed faintly.

He knew better than anyone what sort of man Nicholas II was.

A man who read documents meticulously but could not read between the lines.

A man who believed the words on a report exactly as written.

That was precisely why they had all been able to work in such comfort until now, was it not?

But this time, they said, he had pinpointed not something between the lines but a contradiction in the report itself.

And from a passage just two lines long.

“V-very well. That will do for now.”

It was a variable he had never imagined, but still within controllable bounds.

Assume the worst case.

Dismissal.

It was barely a year since the previous minister had been assassinated by a Socialist Revolutionary terrorist’s bullet.

Lose the title of Minister of Internal Affairs, and the bodyguards vanished with it.

And with the bodyguards gone, his life, already on those bastards’ list, would be as good as running on a timer.

But what kind of man was the Tsar?

This was a man constitutionally unable to endure an unpleasant confrontation.

A man who had never once announced a dismissal to anyone’s face.

So it would probably come by letter, wouldn’t it?

Or be passed along through one of his intimates.

He spent two days like that, on pins and needles.

On the third day, instead of a letter from the Tsar, the Emperor’s kinsman, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, unexpectedly appeared in his office.

“Minister. I have come to convey His Majesty’s will.”

“…Yes.”

Try as he might not to, his whole body went rigid.

“His Majesty has judged that keeping you in your post is necessary for the Empire.”

Of course.

Of course, that was our Majesty.

This was exactly why the men beneath him loved that man.

Just as a smile of relief threatened to spread inside him, a follow-up sentence issued from the Grand Duke’s mouth.

“However.”

“…Yes?”

“There is an order that every official involved in the Kishinev affair be removed from office or demoted at once. The dismissal of Governor-General Raaben of Bessarabia will likewise be announced as of tomorrow.”

“…Every official, you said.”

“Every official, he said. And know that the list of three men on your immediate staff who took part in editing the reports has already been handed over.”

Cold sweat began running down his spine once more.

This wasn’t just cutting off the tail; it meant hacking off all four limbs and mounting them on the wall.

“Minister. His Majesty bade me convey one thing more.”

“…Yes.”

“Henceforth, We expect not a single letter to be omitted from any report that comes before Us. That is all.”

The Grand Duke rose from his seat, shut the door behind him, and was gone.

Left alone in his office, Plehve could not move a muscle for a long while.

Get caught again, and next time it would be the end. That was the message.

Well, it couldn’t be helped.

If he could keep his seat, those terms were worth swallowing, were they not?

But reality proved crueler still.

“Minister. The Okhrana says it will conduct a comprehensive audit of every reporting channel for the three years before Kishinev.”

“…What?”

“By His Majesty’s order, they say.”

It was never going to end with Kishinev alone?

Plehve’s hands trembled.

Because among all the reports shrunk down over the years, there was a hole incomparably larger than anything to do with Jews.

The Reka Yalu (Yalu River) Timber Company.

There was a danger that the flow of funds funneled into the Far East through its chief, Bezobrazov, would all be exposed at once.

And this was a venture Plehve himself had actively championed; there was no hiding it.

Sure enough, catastrophe arrived in an instant.

“Minister. The Director of the Police Department has reportedly submitted a report to His Majesty concerning budget line items connected to the Yalu Timber Company.”

“N-no, that’s….”

“Okhrana Section Chief Yakov was said to be present at the briefing as well.”

Having accepted the condition of keeping his ministership, what he had to do here was clear.

Burn every bridge back with his own hands and reorganize the ministry exactly as the Tsar wished.

Officially, of course, nothing changed.

The Okhrana remained under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Police Department would remain under the minister’s jurisdiction.

But any pretext for blocking the Police Department and the Okhrana from reporting directly to the Tsar was now gone forever.

When word came that the dedicated counterintelligence agency under discussion as a follow-up to the Akashi affair, though nominally under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was likewise being designed so that its reports went directly to the Tsar, Plehve at last understood the whole picture.

From the very beginning, the aim had been to bring the Ministry of Internal Affairs to heel.

“But… who on earth?”

It made no sense.

A design this intricate had to have someone who drew up the plan.

The problem was that, from the way things were unfolding, one could only conclude Nicholas II himself had ordered this operation.

That Nicholas II, who fled unpleasant situations with all his might and hid behind his wife whenever a decision had to be made.

“Surely he hasn’t been playing the good-natured fool all this time while sharpening his knife?”

No, that’s absurd. A man like that would have brought the entire government to heel from the very start of his reign.

Nicholas II had, after all, ascended the throne without even a proper heir’s education.

Then had someone become his advisor?

“Witte? No, Witte would never move like this.”

Pobedonostsev? No, that old man had been at the Tsar’s side forever, but this kind of hands-on maneuvering wasn’t his style.

Then what had changed recently?

The Akashi affair surfaced in Plehve’s mind.

That was exactly when the Tsar had suddenly begun showing hair-raising judgment in counterintelligence matters.

The half-joking rumor that the Tsar found his inspiration in the bathroom had reached his ears as well.

He had laughed it off at the time… but had the man truly awakened, this late in the day?

What else could it be?

Nothing had changed, apart from his taking a young child into the palace and playing the kindly emperor.

In the end, no answer came.

“The Emperor… taking charge of state affairs, is it.”

Faced with an impossible reality, Plehve could do nothing against a situation so far beyond all expectation but take the beating, one-sidedly.

Because it was, quite literally, an impossible reality.

* * *

“Hahahaha! Misha! Listen to this!”

A few days later, the Tsar appeared in the bathroom once more, striding in as grandly as a general returning in triumph.

“Disloyal men tried to blind my eyes, but they never stood a chance. Hahaha!”

-There he goes again. Remember how he swaggered around after the Akashi affair like he’d done it all himself?

Oh, I remember. He kept going on back then about how nothing escapes the eyes of a Tsar blessed by God.

“Your Majesty, were there more bad men in the government after all?”

“Yes. I looked into Primorye as you advised, and it was far worse than I imagined.”

“Wow… how bad was it?”

“Well, I don’t fully understand it myself, but it seems certain men in the Far East were running a timber business along the Yalu River and siphoning money from the state treasury.”

“What? Aren’t those just thieves?”

“Rats, the lot of them. A retired cavalry officer named Bezobrazov, apparently, running a large operation in the Far East. The problem is that this business was no mere commerce; it went stirring up a militarily sensitive region.”

By any common sense, what kind of idiots would sit there chuckling while soldiers disguised as lumberjacks slipped back and forth across a military border?

Even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ working-level men negotiating with Japan had been sending warning after warning that it was dangerous, and every one of them had been brushed aside.

“Then it’s even more serious than the Kishinev incident?”

“…Yes. This is a matter that could genuinely lead to war. Though even so, the likes of Japan could hardly pose any real threat to us.”

But the truly astonishing part was that those men weren’t even provoking Japan on purpose to start a war.

In fact, nowhere in the documents the Tsar uncovered was there anything resembling a war plan.

Just scheme after scheme to skim a little more money.

Brazen it out like this, get stomped flat by Japan in the end, and cut and run. That’s the whole template, proven in the original history.

-How about that? This is the reality of your motherland, the Russian Empire.

How about it? I’m moved.

So moved my heart aches; it’s positively electrifying.

“Misha, without you, I would never even have known imperial funds were bleeding away into such things.”

The Tsar looked at me and smiled gently.

“It would have been a disaster had I not known, but now that I know, what is there to worry about? Hahaha!”

“What did the people at the Ministry of Internal Affairs say?”

“Internal Affairs and Foreign Affairs both said that setting things right from now on should be quite enough.”

No, no, how do they not see what’s right in front of them?

It’s a war crisis, you idiots.

…At this point, maybe this isn’t just a Nicholas II problem.

For my own sanity, it seems healthier to regard the entire Russian Empire as one enormous Nicholas II.

“I’m glad there’s… no problem, then.”

“Of course, of course. So just keep helping me at my side, as you always have. I’ve brought some delicious snacks today; let’s have them together.”

Sure, sure. It’s fine.

If anything, this situation isn’t half bad.

With no one but men just like him at the Emperor’s side, naturally it falls to me to help him.

So that our dear Majesty has no choice but to lean on me more and more, and listen ever closer to what I say.

“Yes, Your Majesty! Thank you.”

By the time the war with Japan is well and truly over, they’ll all be unable to live without me.

Not just Nicholas II, but everyone in this palace.