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government, because I believed the revolution and the Russian republic to be killed by Bolshevism, instead of understanding, on the contrary, that under the standard of bolshevism, the revolution and the republic were progressing and asserting themselves, and that the bolshevik government alone was capable of regrouping, on the basis of the Soviets and Federation, all the nationalities which had formerly constituted the Russian State. But my monarchic conception was not at all that of Noulens. What our ambassador had in view,—when he „secretly“ let it be known to „friends of the right“ that M. Clemenceau himself thought that a monarchic government best suited the requirements of Russia,—was the re-establishment of what had previously existed, in a slightly different form (a constitutional monarchy), but with, perhaps, even more „firmness“, more force in the exercise of its sovereign power. Briefly, a monarchy in the western, European meaning of the word. What I conceived, on the contrary, was the establishment of a popular monarchy. On many occasions already, under the former regime, I had often expressed the idea that the Russian monarchy should never develope in the direction of an impotent and obsolete parliamentarism, which would not be able to rejuvenate and restore it, but that it should rather go back to its origins, the profound national traditions of Russia, from which it had deviated in order to become autocratic, which is a mixture of oriental despotism and west European absolutism.
The national form of Russian monarchy had the form of a popular government with the
