3817 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY-THE GREAT WAR.
Presently the door opened, and Jurofski,
chairman of the commission, and armed Red
Guards entered the apartment. With a
loud laugh Jurofski said to the Czar, "I see
you are already prepared." "Yes," said the
Czar, "I am ready." "Our visit does not
concern you alone," said Jurofski. "We shall
exterminate your wife and your whole brood
also."
On orders from Jurofski the Red Guards
surrounded the family and drove them from
the room. The Czar went first with his son,
who had fallen in a swoon, in his arms. The
ex-monarch was deadly pale and swayed
but quickly recovered himself. The Czarina
and the beautiful young Grand Duchesses
followed, the former praying softly all the
way. The Baroness Bookovegen, who had
come into the room, wept convulsively and
had to be dragged to the cellar which had
been selected as the place of execution.
Several other persons in the Czar's household were also taken thither.
The Red Guards feared to use their rifles
lest the bullets would rebound from the
cellar walls, so they shot down the condemned persons with revolvers, one after
the other. The Czarina was shot first, then
the Grand Duchesses, and last of all the
Czar. The mangled bodies were then placed
on a motor-truck and taken, the same night,
to a deserted mine shaft outside the city,
where they were burned and the ashes
covered with dirt.
Thus perished the last of the Czars. His
fate and that of his family was as tragic as
any to be found in all history, and their
murder was utterly unjustifiable. As a
private individual, the Czar was in many
respects a good man, much better than
almost any of his predecessors. That there
was tyranny and oppression under his rule
is beyond question, but the inheritance of
past generations was more to blame than he.
At times, he displayed a desire for progress,
and, as we have seen, it was he who called
the first Hague Peace Conference. It was
the irony of fate that he and those dear to
him should have perished in the aftermath
of a great war which would have never
taken place had his plan been carried out.
At the time of the revolution which
dethroned him, an effort was made by his
enemies to convince the world that the
Czar was a traitor to the Allied cause. This
was untrue. There were persons of influence in Russia who were traitors, but the
Czar was not. At the crisis of the revolution, one of his generals said to him that the
only thing that could save the monarchy
would be to open the Vistula Gate to the
Germans. "I will never do that," said the
Czar decisively, and it was not done. Up
to the end, he hoped that victory would
crown the Allied arms, and, in view of his
loyalty to the cause, he deserved better of
the Allied world than some writers would
have us suppose.
The Czar fell partly because the day for
autocrats was past, but largely because he
lacked decision of character and had not the
ruthless force which a successful autocrat
must possess. As in the case of Louis XVI
of France, with whom he is in some respects
comparable, his very virtues tended to his
undoing.
It had been the hope of the Central Powers
that their other enemies, influenced by Russian events, would also enter peace negotiations. On December 25, 1917, at the first
conference at Brest-Litovsk, Count Czernin,
Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary, acted