Chapter 44: Master of the Empire (2)

The old Okhrana was dead, and the age of the new Imperial Okhrana had come.

Naturally, the nobles who had been so frantic to drag Yakov down had no way of knowing when the Okhrana would begin its revenge, and so they trembled in fear day after day.

Trying to bury a rival and failing meant being buried oneself instead, and that was the fate written into Russian politics.

Even the Nobles’ Committee, which had opposed the reorganization of the Okhrana, judged that a retaliatory investigation by Yakov was an inevitable next step.

They had gone so far as to fabricate evidence to put a man in the ground, so what sort of pushover would simply let that slide?

As expected, Yakov and the Okhrana set about their criminal investigations at once.

The targets, however, were nothing at all like what the nobles had feared.

“The search for the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which turned a blade upon the imperial house, continues. But we will also arrest every man who has harmed the public while trading on His Majesty’s name.”

Rounding up the revolutionaries who had dared to attempt the assassination of Nicholas II fell well within the range of the expected.

That, after all, was simply something that had to be done.

But the first non-socialists the newborn Okhrana hauled in were, astonishingly, the far-right extremists who shouted long live the Tsar while making a habit of violence.

“Alexander Dubrovin! You are under immediate arrest for organizing a militia under the pretext of serving His Majesty and inflicting enormous harm upon the public!”

“Wh-what is the meaning of…we did it for His Majesty, against the Jews and the commies….”

“And when exactly did His Majesty tell you to do anything of the sort? Take the lot of them!”

In truth, the Black Hundreds really were men who proclaimed that the Tsar’s autocracy was the very foundation of Russia.

Along the way they had suppressed revolutionaries, raised pogroms that massacred Jews on any number of occasions, and even committed acts of violence against nobles and wealthy capitalists.

But since they genuinely sought an absolute monarchy with the Tsar at its center, the Tsar had no particular reason to mobilize the Okhrana and beat them down.

And so, all the more reason to put them on the guillotine as an example.

“His Majesty, as the father of every citizen of Russia, will never tolerate private violence of this kind.”

From the beginning the Black Hundreds had gone about with crowds of men at their backs, near enough to a vigilante band, making a nuisance of themselves wherever they went, so opinion of them was poor even among the nobility.

The nobles, who had been braced to the last nerve for the newborn Okhrana’s expected course of action, let out a sigh of relief.

Of course, I hadn’t marked the Black Hundreds simply to shore up public sentiment.

“His Majesty’s name should be a symbol of reason, of tolerance, of prosperity. It must never become a symbol of repression and violence. The people who encourage that sort of thing are best cut away before they can grow.”

“The Young Master speaks the truth. And because we have given the impression that even those loyal to the Tsar will be punished if they break the law, the citizens’ support is climbing higher still.”

This report was in no way an exaggeration, nor the flattery of grasping sycophants.

Let’s take a look at the list of reports that came in today.

Extermination of the commie revolutionary forces proceeding on schedule, arrests of right-wing extremists drawing continued cheers from the citizens, cases of corruption uncovered in the audits of the Orthodox Church up 30% on last week.

I recited every bit of it in detail before the Emperor, day after day.

“Your Majesty, a report has come in that the workers in the Petersburg factory districts have been forming prayer meetings of their own accord, praying for Your Majesty’s health. Similar movements have been observed in Kiev as well.”

“Well now…is that truly so? No one put them up to it?”

“Yes. They say the prayer meetings are not staged from above at all, but genuinely spontaneous.”

I could see the corners of Nicholas II’s mouth twitching.

No doubt he was feeling in full just how good it was to be respected from the heart, and not merely for his authority or his position.

“Your Majesty, the harvest reports from the southern regions don’t look right, though. This year is fine, but if you put together the soil conditions in the various districts and the way the climate is trending, it looks quite likely there’ll be a crop failure next year.”

“Wh-what was that? A crop failure? Can such a thing even be known?”

“I couldn’t say for certain, but wouldn’t it be right to prepare? If the harvest fails, everything we’ve built up until now could come down.”

I had spoken as though I were analyzing data, but this is prophecy, not prediction.

According to Seong-jun’s knowledge, the harvest in Russia would fail the very next year, and the year after that the fallout of the famine would blanket the country in earnest.

As they say, a country with no luck in it can do nothing right, and in the original history, with the public mood already ugly, the famine came down on top of everything else and the Tsar’s support tanked completely.

Fortunately, Nicholas II, who these days believed anything I said first and asked afterward, showed genuine worry instead of any suspicion about how one could possibly predict a crop failure.

“Then how should we deal with it?”

“First we should stockpile the surplus grain from the regions with good harvests in advance, and I think the most urgent thing is to build a system that uses the Okhrana’s nationwide intelligence network to send up each province’s harvest conditions in real time.”

“Oh, oh, yes. Director! See that Misha’s proposal is carried out at once.”

“Ah, and Your Majesty, there’s one more thing I’d like to raise here.”

-Don’t forget the real problem isn’t next year, it’s two years out. The 1906 crop failure is the trailer. The back-to-back failures running from 1907 are the actual crisis.

Yes, yes. I know that perfectly well, which is exactly why I’m going to all this trouble.

Anyway, if we start preparing now we can scrape through it somehow, right?

-By a hair?

That’s good enough.

“The Director and I looked at it lots of different ways, and what came out was that the surest way to wipe the commies out root and branch is to take away the citizens’ support for them entirely.”

“The citizens’ support….”

“Yes. In fact, as the current of respect for Your Majesty grows stronger among the citizens, they say that many more useful reports are coming in.”

“Hoh…I see.”

“So the analysis came back saying it would be good to carry out a land reform as part of that. It would make not only the workers but the peasants too into Your Majesty’s strongest supporters.”

“But a land reform would need funds…ah, we have them.”

By chance or by necessity, the imperial house at this moment had funds piled high, more than enough to carry out a land reform.

There was still a great deal remaining of the property and land confiscated from the purged Grand Dukes.

And astonishingly, once the Okhrana had been mobilized for a proper investigation, it turned out there were still plenty of misappropriations that had never been caught, so confiscated property is still piling up in real time even now.

At the fact that the budget was sufficient, the Tsar nodded slowly.

He probably had little interest in how much the peasants’ lives improved, but if this was the surest way to thrash those loathsome revolutionaries, he had no reason to refuse.

“Very well! Let us set it in motion at once”

The Tsar-brand land reform bill drawn up in this way came close to an improved edition of the original history’s Stolypin land reform, with its gaps filled in.

Peasants are permitted to leave the commune and to own land privately, but the sale of land is restricted so that it may take place only between peasants.

It was an additional safeguard put in place to keep land from concentrating in the hands of speculators or rich peasants.

On top of this, it was decided to push forward the measures for improving workers’ conditions that had been promised earlier.

Tighter child labour restrictions, mandatory industrial accident compensation, the eradication of payment in kind.

Every one of them was the strongest blade imaginable for stripping the revolutionaries’ agitation slogans of their power.

“If we do this, the opposition from the factory owners could be rather fierce….”

“There’s no one who can openly raise a flag against Your Majesty right now anyway. The results will prove it, and since it doesn’t touch the nobles directly, they’ll be quiet for a while yet.”

“Hmm…true enough. From what I’ve been hearing lately, the nobles have settled down as well, which is a relief. Falling out with the nobility for nothing only makes life tiresome. Director Yakov has made a great decision.”

“I told you, didn’t I? The Director’s loyalty is the real thing.”

The Tsar seemed to think Director Yakov had swallowed his anger for the sake of the greater cause, but that guess was half right and half wrong.

Lop off the heads of a few of the nobles to make an example, and new ones would only keep sprouting like a hydra’s, wouldn’t they?

The moment Plehve stepped down as minister, Durnovo took up Plehve’s will and carried on with the same nonsense, which was proof plain enough.

The only way to solve that was to plough up the soil in which those rotten weeds grew, all of it.

That was exactly why I was driving the Tsar’s popular support to its very limit.

If matters kept turning this way, the revolutionaries would have no choice but to realize it, however much they hated to.

That revolution from below had now become impossible.

* * *

When the old Moron Monarch Nicholas II died and the reign of the reborn New-Neo Nicholas II began, Russia met with an upheaval of the first order.

First of all, the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party effectively stopped breathing.

It began with the arrest of Savinkov and Chernov for the attempted assassination of the Tsar; the annihilation of the Combat Organization and a nationwide sweep followed; and the citizens’ voluntary denunciations drove in the final blow.

The Socialist Revolutionary Party had always been an extraordinarily tenacious organization.

Tsar after Tsar had tried to tear it out by the roots, but because it possessed a firm base of support, even when its strength was broken it never quite went under altogether.

But once the Tsar’s land reform was announced as well, the nails went straight into the coffin the Socialist Revolutionary Party already lay half inside.

Land confiscated from the purged Grand Dukes is to be distributed to the peasants.

Land illegally misappropriated is to be recovered and returned to the peasants.

When this news spread, cries of long live the Tsar broke out in farming villages across the whole of Russia.

“His Majesty is giving us land?”

“They say he’s giving back what was taken from the corrupt ones!”

“He truly is our Father Tsar! Long live His Majesty!”

The Socialist Revolutionary Party was an organization that had begun with the cry of giving the land back to the peasants.

And yet the Tsar had announced the reform first, and the men who shouted for revolution had tried to kill that same Tsar.

“You don’t suppose those commies are hiding in our village too?”

“They say if there’s anyone suspicious, report them straight away.”

“Of course we should! If that lot kicks up trouble and His Majesty’s reform is delayed, we don’t get our land!”

“The other day a shifty fellow turned up next door. You think he might be a commie?”

The Socialist Revolutionary Party had held out doggedly, but once the citizens turned into its chief enemy, it had no means left of holding out at all.

Even within the revolutionary ranks the mood was wretched.

“If only that bastard Savinkov hadn’t gone charging about….”

“Can’t the extremists just crawl into a corner and keep still, please? It isn’t the Okhrana, it’s you lot who are the revolution’s worst enemy!”

The standing of the extremist faction, who had cried out for the Tsar’s assassination, for violence and terror, had already dropped clean through the floor.

And the man who felt this brutal reality most vividly of all was Trotsky, in hiding in Petersburg.

When he walked the streets, all he could hear were the voices of citizens singing the Tsar’s praises.

In the taverns, in the markets, outside the factory gates.

Wherever he went, not a trace of the spirit of revolution was to be found.

“Heard the Okhrana hauled Dubrovin off the other day?”

“Naturally. Any violence His Majesty hasn’t permitted is a crime, they say.”

“Ahh, Russia’s changing, all right. This too must be His Majesty’s grace.”

Russia was changing, certainly, just as the citizens said.

But this change ran in precisely the opposite direction from the one Trotsky had dreamed of.

He had to pull the revolutionary organization back together.

It was his task, just as M expected of him, to set the crumbling revolutionary organization right and show it hope.

But in a situation like this, what vision was there left to offer?

In a world where citizens raced one another to inform on their neighbours, no one could stand up and call for an armed uprising.

With the land reform, and now a labour standards law being drawn up on top of it, both great pillars, the peasants and the workers, were bowing their heads toward the Tsar. How could a man so much as put the word revolution in his mouth?

However many manifestos the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks print off in Geneva, if there is not a speck of response back home, it amounts to nothing but a grand waste of effort.

-Russia is marching toward ruin, and so the day of revolution will draw nearer, and ever faster.

The vast proposition the revolutionaries had shared until now is being shaken to its very foundations.

The anger and exhaustion that had been building up in the citizens had begun to subside under the Tsar’s reforms, and the conviction that the hour of revolution was close at hand was drifting into territory not far from delusion.

Lenin, sitting in Geneva, does not know this reality.

Martov does not know it either.

This air of despair, which only a man on the ground can feel, they do not understand.

Just as he was wandering in a darkness where he could not see an inch ahead, Gapon came to him.

“Mr. Trotsky, a letter has come from M.”

Trotsky, grown haggard in the space of a few short weeks, took the paper Gapon held out with a listless hand.

[With the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s rampage and the Tsar’s reforms, revolution from below has become impossible.]

Was even M about to pass a death sentence on the revolution?

His heart felt as though it had frozen solid, but the next line of the letter set that dying heart beating again.

[The only method left is revolution from above; what the revolutionaries must do is plant a new seedling bearing the spirit of revolution up at the very top. A difficult road, but by no means an impossible one.]

Faint though it was, was he saying an ember of hope still remained, thin as a thread?

Perhaps M was seeing something that Trotsky could not.

[The only revolutionary who can prepare this great undertaking and raise that seedling is you, Trotsky.]

If you have the confidence to bear this weighty task, make contact.

I will show you the way.

“But what…what on earth does this mean?”

That revolution from below is drawing close to impossible is beyond all doubt.

He confirms it in the streets every single day.

But did that make revolution from above a possible thing?

The Tsar supporting the revolution? Or a revolutionary set up as Tsar?

Neither one was any more realistic than the other, was it?

And yet Trotsky knew.

M’s insight has never once been wrong.

It was a possibility he had never so much as imagined until now…but what if it could be done?

Trotsky’s hands began to tremble with excitement and exhilaration.

~~~

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