Chapter 43: Master of the Empire
Confess to illegal surveillance, or confess to evidence fabrication.
Under ordinary circumstances the former is the lesser evil, but given the present situation, illegal surveillance is hardly something a man can own up to lightly either.
The Emperor himself, of all people, had ordered the organization expanded, and the Ministry had turned the Police Department loose on illegal surveillance as though it had been waiting for the chance?
That is as good as a formal declaration of intent saying ‘our Ministry of Internal Affairs does not care what the Emperor says’.
Of course, Minister Durnovo had his grievances too.
The custom of treating the Tsar’s word as so much hot air was not one Durnovo had started, after all.
It was a Russian tradition handed down from one generation to the next since the earliest days of Nicholas II’s reign, something closer to a basic qualification that any minister was expected to possess.
True, the previous minister, Plehve, had been thoroughly stripped bare after concealing the persecution of the Jews, but even then the ministers had written it off as Plehve’s personal incompetence.
But as time went on, something had felt steadily more off, and by the time he came to his senses, it had come to this.
This had begun as the impeachment of the Emperor’s upstart right hand. So why was he suddenly the one standing on the guillotine?
Minister Durnovo’s head swam for a moment, but he made his decision quickly.
In a situation like this, there is only one choice open to him.
“I… that is, this is… My apologies. The reports coming up from below were said to be beyond doubt, and to have already passed verification, so I drew my conclusions too hastily. That I clouded Your Majesty’s eyes and ears with fabricated evidence of this kind, I most sincerely beg your pardon.”
Save my own skin first, worry about the rest later.
A minister so incompetent that he had no idea what his subordinates were doing would be hard pressed to escape a downfall, and the Police Department would not slip the blade of an ouster either.
But what does any of that matter?
What matters most is getting out of this crisis with his own skin in one piece.
“Ah… so the minister is telling us he did not know.”
“Yes. If I am condemned as an incompetent minister, I have nothing to say in my defense. I had held the office only a short while, and a number of reports came up from the Police Department stating that verification was already complete….”
For something invented on the spot, it was a fairly plausible excuse.
For a newly appointed minister to trust a report the Police Department has sent up marked as verified is ordinary procedure.
Naturally, the fact that the report was fabricated leaves room to argue that the minister’s own checks had been shoddy from the start, but that falls under incompetence, not malice.
‘There. Do it this way, and they can’t pin anything on me.’
As expected, Yakov did not press the minister any further.
After a brief silence, he gave a small nod and spoke.
“There is certainly reason in the minister’s claim that he trusted the Police Department’s reports.”
Then he let a pause draw out before turning his gaze toward the representative of the Ministry of Justice.
“Before this material went up to His Majesty, did it pass verification by a prosecutor of the Ministry of Justice?”
Struck out of nowhere by the ricochet, the Justice representative’s face stiffened faintly.
“We… learned of the existence of that material for the first time today.”
“In other words, it never once passed through a prosecutor’s verification.”
“Th… that is because the Ministry of Internal Affairs submitted it directly to His Majesty. It went through no procedure under our ministry’s jurisdiction.”
Of course.
The Ministry of Justice was scrambling to dodge responsibility as well.
Then again, a man capable of standing up here and saying that the fault was in fact his own would never have caused a mess like this in the first place.
Yakov walked slowly toward the seats of the review committee.
“Members of the review committee, allow me to summarize the facts established here today.”
St. George Hall fell silent once more.
“The Police Department manufactured fabricated evidence, the Minister of Internal Affairs submitted it to His Majesty without verification, and the prosecutors of the Ministry of Justice took no part whatsoever in the process.”
Gathered up and laid out like this, the reality is so wretched that one can only marvel. This is Russia, all right.
“But having come this far, I cannot let one point pass unspoken. Is a thing like this truly confined to this present moment?”
Yakov let his eyes travel slowly across the observers’ gallery.
“While the Grand Dukes were embezzling hundreds of millions of rubles, where were the prosecutors? His Majesty received not a single report.”
Silence.
“While Rasputin was in secret communication with revolutionaries and plotting His Majesty’s assassination, what were the prosecutors doing? What did the Police Department do? It was our Okhrana that brought it to light.”
Silence again.
“When the Socialist Revolutionary Party was running bomb workshops throughout the country, was it the Police Department that uncovered them? Did the prosecutors conduct any proper investigation?”
Naturally, not one of them could open his mouth.
They had done nothing at all.
“The audit of the Orthodox Church turned up 47 cases of corruption in the first week alone. Misappropriation of monastery lands, embezzlement of church donations, simony. Misconduct that has continued for decades. Have the prosecutors ever uncovered so much as one such case?”
Having poured out his oration, Yakov turned and bowed respectfully to the Tsar.
“Your Majesty, I have no wish to weigh anyone’s guilt or innocence. I am only laying before you the reality of Russia exactly as it stands.”
The point is not that certain individuals are at fault, but that the system itself is warped.
“The body that holds investigative authority does not investigate, the Police Department is mobilized for backroom schemes to remove internal rivals, and every department disregards Your Majesty’s authority. What has taken place here today is, in the end, nothing more than a by-product of that.”
As Yakov’s last words fell, the Tsar, seated at the head of the hall, slowly drew a sheet of paper from inside his coat.
He unfolded it and studied it for a long moment, and the eyes of the entire hall converged on that paper.
He sat at the highest place in the room, so no one could see what was written on it, but every man gathered there assumed the Tsar was reviewing some secret document.
Who could ever imagine that the paper was an answer sheet written out for him by the ten-year-old brat sitting beside Yakov?
At last the Tsar lowered the paper and spoke, heavily.
“Minister Durnovo.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I will not remove you from your post. That you acted on the reports which came up from below was, in itself, an effort to fulfill your duty as minister.”
At the thought that he had escaped by the skin of his teeth, Durnovo fought to keep the corners of his mouth from twitching upward.
The Tsar had always been like this.
A pushover who let his subordinates’ failures slide with a smile, and every man knew it and had been trading on it for years.
“But here today, I have confirmed that the guilt lies not with my ministers but with the fundamental system of this country.”
…Hm? What was this?
At the premonition that something was turning in a strange direction, the air in the hall froze.
“The Police Department gathered evidence through illegal surveillance, the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not verify it, and the Ministry of Justice was not involved at all. Which is to say that not one of them, not the checks, not the verification, not the investigation, was carried out as it ought to have been.”
The Tsar’s eyes moved from Durnovo to the Justice representative, and then over the whole of the review committee’s benches.
“Your Majesty, surely you do not intend to place the Police Department under the Okhrana….”
“No. Why would I do such a thing?”
The Tsar cut off the words Durnovo had barely managed to get out.
“The police are an organization that looks after the welfare of the people, so let them concentrate on their proper duty. Only the unnecessary functions will be transferred to the Okhrana.”
Up to this point it was still bearable.
It amounted to escaping the situation with minimal losses.
“And one thing more.”
It was what came next that drove them all into shock.
“It has been sufficiently confirmed today that the prosecutors of the Ministry of Justice, who at present hold investigative authority, are not performing their function. And not in this matter alone. They stood idly by while the Grand Dukes embezzled tens of millions of rubles, and so I have concluded that it can be overlooked no longer.”
The Tsar glanced down at the paper once more.
“When a single body monopolizes investigative authority, affairs such as this repeat themselves. Taking this incident as the occasion, investigative authority shall be granted to the Imperial Okhrana, so that it may stand as a mutual check upon the prosecutors of the Ministry of Justice, and a sound system may be built.”
“Y-Your Majesty….”
That the Ministry of Justice has not had its investigative authority stripped away outright is some small mercy, but with a right they have enjoyed exclusively until now being handed to somebody else besides, how could any of them be at ease?
Yet there was no solid ground on which to object.
The incompetence that had been raised again and again throughout the proceedings had, thanks to this hearing, received its finishing touch.
And on top of that, this is not a matter of funneling investigative authority to the Okhrana alone, but of building a structure in which it stands shoulder to shoulder with the existing prosecutors as a mutual check. How is anyone to put a word of dissent to that?
A hearing convened to impeach the Director-General had turned, in the space of a breath, into a ceremony celebrating the Okhrana’s acquisition of investigative authority.
He had come away with his life, and yet what in the world is this sense of defeat, this feeling of having been danced across someone’s palm from beginning to end?
Durnovo found himself looking up at the Tsar, who was folding the paper at the head of the hall and tucking it back inside his coat.
The expression was as guileless and as innocent as it had always been, but it no longer looked laughable.
No. Dread of a Tsar who had been performing that face all this while raised goosebumps over his entire body.
To think this man had been playing the fool who understood nothing while he assembled a monster of an organization like this.
Suspicion hardened into certainty.
“You have all worked hard through a long session. The minister as well should go and rest.”
…Does he mean you got your ass handed to you, so go home and keep your head down?
To Durnovo, and not to him alone but to the ears of every noble gathered there, that word of comfort from the Tsar sounded like nothing but a declaration of victory.
* * *
Once we had slipped out of the Winter Palace and climbed into the carriage, Yakov was the first to bow his head.
“Young Master.”
“You worked hard, Director. You were really impressive today.”
“Not at all. Had you not been there, Young Master, I could never have imagined a result like this. That we would come away with investigative authority as well… this has gone far better than we planned, has it not?”
“It’s all because our dear ministers helped out so beautifully.”
The carriage carrying the two of us began to roll slowly forward.
“The thing we were most worried about, really, was Minister Durnovo taking all the responsibility on himself and climbing up on the cross.”
“We were… If he had, it would have ended as the criminal act of one Minister of Internal Affairs.”
“If the minister had confessed to every charge, it would have wrapped up with Durnovo alone getting the axe and the Ministry of Internal Affairs shrinking a little. Our good minister really did us an enormous favor.”
When every last one of the ministers protests that he personally knew nothing and that the fault lies with the organizational system, well, what is anyone to do?
A system with problems in it will simply have to be repaired.
They have handed over, of their own accord, a harvest that whacking one lousy minister could not begin to compare with.
Yakov, who had been nodding quietly and savoring the victory, abruptly burst out laughing.
“Haha… watching men blinded by self-preservation end up digging their own graves, I suppose this is why they say history repeats itself.”
“Thanks to them, that settles one of our biggest worries.”
This time Yakov only nodded, without much to say.
The thing an emperor bent on reform has most to fear, and the word no one dares speak aloud.
A coup d’état.
The Tsar of Russia was called an absolute ruler, but in actual history, when the nobility fell out with a tsar to the bitter end, the matter ending in the tsar’s defeat had been surprisingly common.
Paul I, for one, and Peter III as well.
“But that can’t happen anymore.”
“Indeed. Since the purge of the Grand Dukes, Grand Duke Mikhailovich has held personnel authority over the Imperial Guard, and the pro-Tsar faction has taken the key posts. On top of which the Okhrana now holds a monopoly on information, so at the first odd sign we can mount a targeted investigation with the Gendarme Corps.”
Unlike the Ministry of Justice, which has nothing but plain investigative authority, the Okhrana can carry out full military operations with the Gendarme Corps.
Which means that at the faintest whiff of anything suspicious, we can shake a man down to the lint in his pockets and drag him before the Emperor.
Yakov gazed out of the carriage for a long while without speaking, then opened his mouth carefully.
“It strikes me anew. When you are no longer an aide but the man in charge of the Okhrana, Young Master, I find myself curious what this country will look like.”
-Bit of a drama queen, isn’t he. We’re barely halfway there.
Not even halfway. All I’ve done is finish laying the cornerstones for seizing that half.
“I still have a long way to go. And by the time I get there, you’ll be somewhere higher up too, Director.”
“Haha. Then I shall be counting on your good graces.”
Yakov has no way of knowing it, but the head of the Okhrana is not the final seat I am aiming for.
Of course, under the present system there is a clear ceiling on how far I can climb.
Even if Nicholas II acknowledges me as his son and, on the strength of my enormous services, recognizes me as a member of the Romanovs, it is the same.
-A princely title might be on the table, though, don’t you think?
Just so.
Grand Duke, or creating a Prime Minister’s post above the Director-General of the Okhrana and seating me in it, all of that lies within the Emperor’s power, but one thing alone, the throne of the Tsar, he cannot give me.
He can do every other thing there is, and that one thing alone was impossible.
Because imperial succession is not Russia’s problem alone; the interests of every royal house in Europe are tangled up in it.
The right of succession is, in effect, a legally guaranteed meal ticket held by every European royal house bound to the others by blood.
Which means that changing the law at will to make an illegitimate son first in line amounts to trampling the rights of every other royal house in Europe.
The moment anyone commits such an act it stops being Russia’s business alone, so however much the Tsar might want it, cleaning up the aftermath is beyond him.
-But you felt it this time too, right? The nobles in this country can’t be crushed unless you’re the Tsar.
That much is true.
When the foundation posts have rotted through, patching the roof and the interior so they look clean doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
But there was exactly one thing wrong with what Seong-jun said.
Why do I have to become Tsar in order to crush the nobles?
-The hell are you talking about? Wasn’t the whole plan to become Tsar and reform this country?
I’m going to reform it, sure, but as long as this country’s nobles are dug in, me becoming Tsar is fundamentally impossible, isn’t it?
-Then how are you supposed to… ahh.
There we go, there we go. Looks like we’re finally on the same page.
Checking the nobles with the Okhrana is one thing, but a sweeping purge is beyond it. And as it happens, there are certain friends out there just begging to be put to use.
Handle them wrong and they would be a double-edged sword, but if they come to believe that I am their one and only hope, well, what then?
The walls are up. Now it’s time to dig the moat.
“Shall we go and collect it, then?”
The position of savior of the revolutionaries.
~~~
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