In an essay not published in his lifetime, Twain wrote “Letters from a Dog to Another Dog Explaining and Accounting for Man” in the early months of 1891. Decrying the brutal nature of man and monarchy, Mark Twain denounced the Russian czar as an example.

Consider the Czar of Russia. His powers are a theft to-day, just as they were when they came originally into his family. His portrait hangs everywhere that you may go, throughout his dominions. His eighty million slaves, instead of being privileged to clod it with mud wherever they find it, and say “This is the posterity of that highwayman that robbed our fathers,” are actually required to take their hats off when they come into its presence, and humbly salute it. … The Czar requires every Russian to spend the fifteen best and most efficient years of his life in the army; and then turns him adrift without pension and ignorant of all ways of sustaining life except by killing people.

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MARK TWAIN CHANGES HIS ATTITUDE

As Mark Twain cultivated his career as a successful writer and lecturer, he became more keenly aware of world politics. Twain’s attitude toward Russian monarchy shifted. Although Twain had devoted little attention to Russian politics between 1867 and 1881, a reading he delivered at the Hartford Monday Evening Club on March 22, 1886 indicates his opinion of the Russian aristocracy changed:

Power, when lodged in the hands of man, means oppression — insures oppression: it means oppression always: … give it to the high priest of the Christian Church in Russia, the Emperor, and with a wave of his hand he will brush a multitude of young men, nursing mothers, gray headed patriarchs, gently young girls, like so many unconsidered flies, into the unimaginable hells of his Siberia, and go blandly to his breakfast, unconscious that he has committed a barbarity …(2).

MARK TWAIN’S ATTITUDE SET IN INK

Anti-czarist comments in Twain’s writings appear more frequently in Twain’s work after George Kennan’s publicity tours. In Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, a manuscript Twain worked on for over thirty years he compared heaven to Russia:

Well, this is Russia — only more so. There’s not the shadow of a republic about it anywhere (4).

AN UNSENT LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF FREE RUSSIA, 1890

In the summer of 1890 Twain also composed a letter which he never mailed to the editor of the publication Free Russia which advocated Russian reforms. Twain’s support of violence to overthrow the Czar along with his impatience with the Russian people for tolerating abuses was evident.

To the Editor of Free Russia,

I thank you for the compliment of your invitation to say something, but when I ponder the bottom paragraph on your first page, and then study your statement on your third page, of the objects of the several Russian liberation-parties, I do not quite know how to proceed. Let me quote here the paragraph referred to:

“But men’s hearts are so made that the sight of one voluntary victim for a noble idea stirs them more deeply than the sight of a crowd submitting to a dire fate they cannot escape. Besides, foreigners could not see so clearly as the Russians how much the Government was responsible for the grinding poverty of the masses; nor could they very well realize the moral wretchedness imposed by that Government upon the whole of educated Russia. But the atrocities committed upon the defenceless prisoners are there in all their baseness, concrete and palpable, admitting of no excuse, no doubt or hesitation, crying out to the heart of humanity against Russian tyranny. And the Tzar’s Government, stupidly confident in its apparently unassailable position, instead of taking warning from the first rebukes, seems to mock this humanitarian age by the aggravation of brutalities. Not satisfied with slowly killing its prisoners, and with burying the flower of our young generation in the Siberian desserts, the Government of Alexander III resolved to break their spirit by deliberately submitting them to a regime of unheard-of brutality and degradation.”

(…)

Suppose you had this granite-hearted, bloody-jawed maniac of Russia loose in your house, chasing the helpless women and little children — your own. What would you do with him, supposing you had a shotgun? Well, he is loose in your house — Russia. And with your shotgun in your hand, you stand trying to think up ways to modify” him.

(…)

Of course I know that the properest way to demolish the Russian throne would be by revolution. But it is not possible to get up a revolution there; so the only thing left to do, apparently, is to keep the throne vacant by dynamite until a day when candidates shall decline with thanks. Then organize the Republic. And on the whole this method has some large advantages; for whereas a revolution destroys some lives which cannot well be spared, the dynamite way doesn’t.

(…)

Consider, that all over vast Russia, from boundary to boundary, a myriad of eyes filled with tears when that piteous news came, and through those tears that myriad of eyes saw, not that poor lady, but lost darlings of their own whose fate her fate brought back with new access of grief out of a black and bitter past never to be forgotten or forgiven.

If I am a Swinburnian — and clear to the marrow I am — I hold human nature in sufficient honor to believe there are eighty million mute Russians that are of the same stripe, and only one Russian family that isn’t.

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As the Russian revolution came to a head in the winter of 1917, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate his throne. He and his family were placed under “house arrest” and moved to various locations across Russia. On the night of July 17-18, 1918 in a cellar in a house in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Ural mountain region, with the approval of Communist Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, Czar Nicholas II, his wife, son, four daughters and several personal attendants were killed with guns and bayonets. Twain’s unpublished phrase “Knife a Romanoff whereever you find him” rings hauntingly prophetic. As Gorky had earlier told interviewers, Twain was a popular writer in Russia and many of his works had been translated into Russian. If Lenin had ever read Twain’s “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” scholars have not alluded to that fact.

For years, the exact burial location of the slain Romanov family remained a secret. In 1977 Boris Yeltsin, acting in his capacity as a Communist party boss in the former city of Ekaterinburg, ordered the house where the killings had taken place to be bulldozed in the middle of the night. Communist leaders feared the house had become a shrine to those who opposed Communist rule. In 1991, acting in his capacity as Russian President, Boris Yeltsin ordered bodies recovered from a mass grave and extensive DNA testing was used to positively identify the remains of Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and three daughters. The remains of a son and one daughter remained unaccounted for. Eighty years to the day after the last Czar of Russia was killed, July 18, 1998, Nicholas II and his family were reburied in St. Petersburg. Boris Yeltsin’s speech at the funeral was a plea for nonviolent methods of change:

Dear fellow citizens: It’s a historic day for Russia.

Eighty years have passed since the slaying of the last Russian emperor and his family. We have long been silent about this monstrous crime We must say the truth: The Yekaterinburg massacre has become one of the most shameful episodes in our history. By burying the remains of innocent victims, we want to atone for the sins of our ancestors.

Those who committed this crime are as guilty as are those who approved of it for decades. We are all guilty. It is impossible to lie to ourselves by justifying senseless cruelty on political grounds. The shooting of the Romanov family is a result of an uncompromising split in Russia society into “us” and “them.” The results of this split can be seen even now.

The burial of the remains of Yekaterinburg is, first of all, an act of human justice. It’s a symbol of unity of the nation, an atonement of common guilt. We all bear responsibility for the historical memory of the nation. And that’s why I could not fail to come here. I must be here as both an individual and the president. I bow my head before the victims of the merciless slaying. While building a new Russia, we must rely on its historical experience.

Many glorious pages of Russian history were connected with the Romanovs. But with this name is connected one of the most bitter lessons: Any attempts to change life by violence is condemned to failure. We must end the century, which has been an age of blood and violence in Russia, with repentance and peace, regardless of political views, ethnic or religious belonging. This is our historic chance. On the eve of the third millennium, we must do it for the sake of our generation and those to come. Let’s remember those innocent victims who have fallen to hatred and violence. May they rest in peace .

In the year 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas II as a martyr. In August 2007 the Associated Press announced the finding of remains believed to be those of the Czar’s missing son and daughter in a burned area in the ground near Yekaterinburg. The finding, if confirmed by DNA testing, would put an end to persistent rumors that members of the Czar’s family had somehow survived execution.

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MARK TWAIN VISITS RUSSIA, 1867

Mark Twain’s first encounter with the ruling Romanov family of Russia was in August 1867 when he met Czar Alexander II in Yalta, during the Quaker City excursion to Europe and the Holy Land. The owners of the ship Quaker City were hoping to interest Czar Alexander II in buying the ship and a visit with him was included in the tour’s itinerary.

Russia, an American ally, had supported the Union efforts during the recent American Civil War. Supporters of the Czar compared him with President Abraham Lincoln. In 1861 Czar Alexander II had issued an Emancipation Manifesto that abolished Russian serfdom — an economic system built around peasant farm labor. Russian serfs were tied to the land on which they lived and, in effect, were human property of wealthy noblemen. Although serfs or peasants could not be sold, the land they were tied to could be sold. Estates were described as containing so many “souls” and when land was sold, it was valued at so much per “soul.” It was an economic system that shared characteristics with the forced labor of black slaves in the United States. Czar Alexander II’s Emancipation Manifesto was equated with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 which expressed the principal that the United States government was finally taking a stand against slavery.

Twain was selected by his fellow travelers to help write a speech addressing Alexander II. The speech was delivered by the American consul to Russia.

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When asked to contribute a Christmas greeting that could be published in newspapers at the end of December 1890, Twain composed the following which appeared in the Boston Daily Globe on December 25, 1890:

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS

It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage, may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, escape [sic] the inventor of the telephone.

MARK TWAIN.

Twain was later quoted as saying:

I had no intention of reflecting on the inventor of the telephone when I started to write. I intended to wish everyone a Happy New Year, with the exception of the Emperor of Russia …Just then the telephone rang … and I went to the telephone and, as usual, lost my temper … I hung up the telephone in disgust and went back to my writing, and instead of the Emperor of Russia I put in the inventor of the telephone.

In Mark Twain, New Anecdotes, Jokes and Stories, edited by Cyril Clemens, (Mark Twain Society, 1929), p. 15.

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