Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Rivet Charles
Title : The last of the Romanofs
Year : 1917

Link download : Rivet_Charles_-_The_last_of_the_Romanofs.zip

Introduction. M. Charles Rivet, the author of this book, is the Petrograd correspondent of the Paris Temps. His knowledge of Russia is quite exceptional. He has been in that country since 1901, and speaks Russian. He went out first as a Professor and remained as a journalist and in both capacities he had special opportunities of mixing with the three great sections of Russian society : the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the peasant class. His sympathies were always with the advanced thinkers, he had many friends among them, especially among the Cadets, and he was the avowed enemy of the old regime. In his letters to the Temps and the Illustration he attempted to awaken the French people to a sense of realities, to bring before them the truth about the Dual Alliance and to warn them of the dangers of secret diplomacy. His newspaper campaigns, somewhat shorn of their full value by the timidity of French statesmen in Russian matters and, later, by the Censorship, made him extremely unpopular with those who ruled the destinies of Russia. This was particularly the case in his attacks on the Minister Maklakof, in his sounding of the alarm when Krupp was about to become a large shareholder in the Putilof Munition Works, and in his denunciation of the weak diplomacy which enabled Berlin to send to Constantinople the Liman von Sanders Military Commission. " This man," said M. Sazonof, " is constantly putting his spoke in our wheels." And M. Rivet was arrested, in Petrograd, in the very thick of the war, as a first step to expulsion. But the Rusgian bureaucrats were afraid to carry out their intention and he was released. His book consists of four parts, to which the three divisions roughly correspond. He has desired to put before the French public—in the first instance—the immediate causes of the Revolution, with a sketch of personalities and powers, to give a clear account of that Revolution and its effects, to describe the political elements composing the last Duma of the old era and the political groupings of post-Revolutionary days, and, lastly, to tell the French how and why they were misled about the Dual Alliance. ...