Chapter 15: Why Would That Be Niki's Fault?

It has long been said that the first person to notice a change in a man is his wife.

The closer the couple, and the happier the marriage, the more a wife tends to catch even the smallest change in her husband the moment it appears.

The marriage of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra was no different.

The woman who loved Nicholas II more than anyone in the world and stood closest to him, the Empress, could not believe a single thing that had been happening in the palace of late.

“Oooh! Great Tsar!”

“I swear I have never seen anyone with insight to match Your Majesty’s. Truly, you are the Tsar God has granted our Russia.”

When she heard men like the Director of the Police Department and an Okhrana section chief singing her husband’s praises, she was dumbfounded.

Could these men be those sycophants she had only ever heard about?

But astonishingly, once she heard the whole story, her husband really had caught a Japanese spy through tremendous deduction and insight.

On top of that, he had displayed judgment that impressed even the Police Department several times over, and just recently he had even seen through a falsified report submitted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

“…I have concluded that there is some conspiracy at work here.”

“Pardon? Your Majesty, do you mean to say….”

“They tell me my husband has been going to the bathroom remarkably often these days. He says that exercising and reflecting in a space all his own helps him organize his thoughts….”

“It is as he says. His Majesty, in a place where no one may disturb him, reflects upon….”

“But I hear young master Misha goes in sometimes. To hand over documents, supposedly, but then it isn’t entirely a space of his own, is it.”

The Empress stared hard at the old man seated before her, Pobedonostsev, the Tsar’s old tutor and young master Mikhail’s current one.

She had no evidence, but a wife’s instinct was shouting that this old man knew something.

“Chief Procurator. Surely you have noticed that the palace has grown rather noisy of late?”

Pobedonostsev nodded slowly.

“Yes. It is brimming with vitality.”

“Can you truly call that vitality?”

For an instant, an unmistakable edge entered the Empress’s voice.

“Before, it was rare for ministers to come see him at all. Even when they had business, they usually submitted it in writing. But these days, Okhrana section chiefs and Police Department directors and their like are lining up to wait for him.”

“It means His Majesty’s abilities are being recognized. If anything, it is cause for celebration.”

“Chief Procurator, do you think I do not know the man, I who have been at his side since before we married? From his accession to this day, he has never once received that kind of appraisal.”

They say that when a person changes overnight, death is near, but her husband was far too young to be called to the Lord.

“His Majesty is the Tsar of Russia. He is a man who may rightly display this much intuition.”

“So with that intuition he caught a Japanese spy named Akashi? And merely by skimming a report?”

“So they say.”

“And the Kishinev affair, he knew something was wrong from just two lines of a report, is that it?”

She might have believed it if it made any sense; how was she supposed to accept claims that not even Olga or Tatiana would swallow?

“Was it perhaps you who helped him, Chief Procurator?”

“Your Majesty. It would not be right for me to speak carelessly of matters concerning His Majesty.”

“Then who on earth is whispering in his ear? Witte? Lopukhin? Or that child who follows him into the bathroom?”

Of course, however clever the boy might be, a child could hardly be playing the leading role in matters like these.

The Empress privately suspected that Misha was receiving advice from the Chief Procurator or someone else and reporting it to the Tsar.

But Pobedonostsev carefully drew a breath, then shook his head and dismissed her words.

“Your Majesty. There is only one thing I can tell you with certainty. Everything now taking place is by His Majesty’s own judgment. No one is pulling any strings.”

“That cannot be….”

“Please trust me. This old man has served the House of Romanov his whole life. Would I ever do anything to harm that house?”

The Empress stared at him for a long moment, her lips trembling.

“But… it cannot be, because….”

“Your Majesty, why on earth do you harbor such suspicions? There must be a reason….”

“Because my husband, my Niki, could not possibly be that smart!”

“Uh…….”

My husband simply isn’t that capable.

At this heartfelt outburst from the Empress, who loved and knew the Emperor better than anyone, even the wily old Pobedonostsev found himself momentarily lost for words.

Because… well, it was true.

* * *

Naturally, Pobedonostsev relayed his conversation with the Empress to the Tsar and me exactly as it had happened.

Her reasoning was clear and cut straight to the heart of the matter, but our Nicholas II sincerely did not share his wife’s view.

“Well, well… really, Sunny underestimates me far too much. You would think she could put a little more faith in her loving husband.”

“Haha….”

-Uh-oh. Busted?

No, not busted. She just suspects something.

Pobedonostsev had warned us to be careful, but he also said she didn’t suspect me in the first place.

She was merely worried that the Director of the Police Department or Pobedonostsev might be filling the Emperor’s head with nonsense.

“Misha, did the Chief Procurator say anything to you, by any chance?”

“Ah, yes. Professor said he doesn’t know anything about it. And he told me not to say anything either.”

The Tsar’s eyebrows rose slightly.

“Good. If Petrovich is taking that line, then there is nothing to worry about.”

“Your Majesty. But I think Professor is right.”

“Hm? About what?”

“All of this has to be Your Majesty’s ability. If people said the Tsar of Russia made his decisions by listening to an 8-year-old, what would become of Your Majesty’s standing?”

Even the Empress is better off simply not knowing about this.

The fewer people who know, the better, always.

And of course, the Tsar himself must never come to think he’s being led around by a child.

Before Nicholas II, sunk in thought for a moment, could offer any reply, I pressed on first.

“All I do is tell Your Majesty simple facts anyway. It’s Your Majesty who actually gives the orders and moves the people, so it isn’t really wrong, is it?”

-Honestly, our Niki probably believes exactly that.

And in a way, this was actually true.

Anyone else would never have chosen to take a child’s words at face value, would they?

It was no exaggeration to say this was an achievement made possible only by Nicholas II, a man incompetent yet brimming with self-regard, and boundlessly soft on his family.

“Hahahaha! Right, exactly right. I am the one who actually accomplished all of it, and yet my Sunny, honestly, what am I to do with her. When your husband does well you ought to be happy for him, so why all the worrying?”

Beaming like that, he looked like a man without a care in the world, but well, my life is easier when this fellow lives carefree, so there was no particular need to correct the misunderstanding.

“But Your Majesty, if we keep talking only in the bathroom, I think Her Majesty will worry even more. What if we changed places naturally, sometimes the study, another day the garden?”

“Yes, that would be best! It certainly would look a bit odd if we only ever met in the bathroom.”

The Tsar was just rising from his seat, saying we might as well move right away, when…

“Your Majesty! Section Chief Yakov of the Okhrana urgently requests an audience!”

The chamber attendant keeping his post outside the bathroom raised his voice in alarm.

At the word “urgently”, the Tsar’s eyes turned utterly serious.

Since Kishinev, he had given standing orders that every case of provincial unrest, regardless of scale, be reported without fail.

“Misha, come out with me.”

“Sorry? Me too?”

“You said you wanted to join the Okhrana, didn’t you? So it won’t look too strange if I bring you along.”

He was right; nobody would pay any mind to a mere 8-year-old hovering nearby.

Following the Tsar into the audience chamber, I saw Section Chief Yakov catching his breath, his expression anxious.

A flicker of question crossed his eyes when he saw me, but the Tsar was quick to speak.

“The boy studies so very hard, you see. He works day and night, saying he will join the Okhrana one day, and I found it so admirable I brought him along to have a look.”

Yakov’s gaze swept over me briefly.

Hearing that an 8-year-old wanted to become an Okhrana man someday and serve the imperial house, he seemed if anything to find it admirable rather than suspicious.

“Truly, Your Majesty is generous beyond measure. Then I shall simply deliver my report here.”

“Do so.”

“Workers’ unrest is breaking out simultaneously across the southern regions. Baku, Tiflis, Odessa, Batumi, Kiev….”

As the names kept rolling out, the Tsar’s expression hardened by degrees.

“For now these are demands for wage increases at individual factories, but the fact that they are erupting in different cities at nearly the same time is troubling.”

“It won’t spread on a large scale, will it?”

“We are taking measures as quickly as possible. However, the scale is larger than we antic….”

-Hey. You know it too, right? They can’t stop that.

Looking at the timing, yeah, even I could tell.

The strikes in southern Russia that ran from May 1903 for over two months.

The first general strike in the history of Imperial Russia, one that sent more than 200,000 workers pouring into the streets, had finally erupted.

It would be fair to say that a crack visible to the naked eye had begun to open in the pillar called Russia, already on the verge of collapse.

“Your Majesty, we are currently deploying all available provincial police and Cossack cavalry to the key points, and….”

Yakov went on talking for a good while longer before withdrawing.

The moment the door closed, the Tsar turned to me.

“Misha. What do you think?”

-Ohh, so even when his man says he’s handling it, he doesn’t just take it all on blind faith anymore? Did he actually grow a learning ability?

Growing a learning ability is great and all, but it’s a little iffy that the fruit of said learning is asking an 8-year-old.

“Your Majesty. May I look at the report the section chief left behind?”

“Yes, have a look.”

I picked up the papers on the table and turned them slowly, one page at a time.

Baku-wage increase demands, roughly 3,000 oil workers.

Tiflis-railway workers on strike, signs of spreading across the whole Caucasus.

Odessa-dockworkers joined by factory workers, city tram service suspended.

Before long I found the record I had been looking for, and without delay I turned to the Tsar.

“…Your Majesty. I found something strange.”

“Already?”

“Here. Look. The Baku report says ‘led by members of the Independent Workers’ Association’, right?”

“So it does.”

“But the same name shows up in the Odessa report, and something similar in Tiflis too. And this workers’ association, it says the police created it.”

The police had created the workers’ organization behind the strikes?

The Tsar’s eyes went wide.

“An organization founded by the police?”

“Yes. It’s written here in a report sent up from the Moscow Okhrana. A man named Zubatov founded a workers’ organization under police direction to manage the workers’ grievances….”

“Ahh, yes. I do seem to recall a report about stealing a march on the revolutionary forces so they could not seduce the workers, something along those lines.”

“Exactly. But Your Majesty, the people who belong to this organization are the ones leading the strikes right now.”

My fingertip moved across the papers, pointing to the three cities’ reports one after another.

I could more or less see what chain of logic had produced this strategy, but both the process and the result were just embarrassingly shoddy, weren’t they?

Imperial Russia, sure enough… my verdict that the whole country is just one giant Niki was not wrong.

“Then… you mean an organization the Okhrana itself raised is inciting the strikes?”

“Not so much inciting as just standing at the front and running along with everyone, I think. These people are real workers too, after all. Asking for more money is probably sincere, don’t you think?”

“Good heavens….”

“Your Majesty. It was the same with Mister Akashi before, and with Kishinev too. Whatever the Okhrana does, they can’t clean up after it. They can’t catch foreign spies, they falsify reports, and this time they can’t even manage an organization they created themselves.”

The Tsar’s face darkened by the moment.

Naturally. The true face of the intelligence organization he had trusted so deeply was being ruthlessly exposed.

“The way I see it, this shouldn’t be left to these people alone. Your Majesty needs to look and judge for yourself. It says here that last year the strikes numbered a mere 30,000. But now, look, they say it will grow more than fivefold in a single year.”

The Tsar sat in silence for a long while, then pressed a hand to his forehead.

“…This Zubatov fellow, where does he belong?”

“It’s written here. The Moscow Okhrana, it says.”

“Dismiss him at once… no, dismissal alone will not be enough, I think.”

Of course, of course.

After being royally stabbed in the back three times in a row, even Nicholas II would feel the creeping alarm that leaving things to those people could end in genuine disaster.

Naturally, this entire mess was the fault of the Okhrana and the Police Department, so bottomlessly incompetent that they hardly deserved the name of an intelligence apparatus.

Had the Emperor not foreseen all of it in advance, even predicting that the problem would grow?

So only one conclusion followed.

The incompetent strike factory that is the Okhrana would be reborn, remade from the roots up.

By… not me, but by the hand of this country’s Emperor.

Into an organization for the Tsar, and the Tsar alone.