Karl Marx

The English Press on the Dead Tsar

I

["Neue Oder-Zeitung" No. 109, March 6, 1855]

London, March 3. All the daily and weekly newspapers appearing today naturally carry leading articles on the death of the Emperor of Russia — but without exception dull and commonplace. The *Times* at least tries to inflate its style with a pathos of a hundred horsepower to the level of a Timur-Tamerlane. We quote only two passages, both compliments for Lord Palmerston. Palmerston’s, the “worst enemy of the Tsar’s”, appointment as Prime Minister had driven up still further the over-excitement which hastened his death. From 1830 to 1840 (the first decade of Palmerstonian foreign policy) the Tsar had abandoned his policy of encroachments and world domination. The one assertion is worth as much as the other.

The *Morning Advertiser*, by contrast, distinguishes itself by the discovery that Michael is the Emperor’s eldest son and therefore the legitimate heir to the throne. The *Morning Post*, Palmerston’s private *moniteur*, reveals in its funeral oration to the English public that

“the Vienna Conferences have, it is true, been postponed for a short time, but will be opened under new auspices,” and that “this afternoon Lord Clarendon is having a meeting with the Emperor Napoleon at Boulogne, where the two governments will exchange their ideas on this sudden and important event.”

The *Daily News* does not believe in the peaceful consequences of the “sudden event”, since the Western powers could not withdraw before Sevastopol fell, and Russia could not withdraw after Sevastopol fell.

II

["Neue Oder-Zeitung" No. 116, March 10, 1855]

London, March 6. The death of Emperor Nicholas gives rise to strange advertisements in the press here. Dr. Granville is being outbid by Mr. James Lee, who has made no medical observations.

“On February 6,” he writes in today’s *Morning Advertiser*, “I sent you a letter in which I said that the Emperor of Russia would be a corpse within 3 weeks, counting from the date of my letter.”

The editorial board of the *Morning Advertiser*, in a postscript, declares that they had indeed received Lee’s letter, but had consigned it to the waste-paper basket as the brainchild of a diseased mind. Lee goes even further. He offers to prophesy the imminent death of another potentate to the *Advertiser*, and on the sole condition that his communication be published. Lee’s prophecies appear to be cheaper than the Sibyl’s books.

The death of the Emperor has also induced Urquhart, as a Highland Scot enjoying the gift of second sight, to emit some Pythic utterances, of which the following is the most characteristic and the most intelligible:

“Blood stood between Nicholas and the Poles, who could not be left behind to be kept under surveillance, and whose 500,000 warriors were required. And it was fully comprehended that the restoration of the white, double-headed eagle — the symbol of that union of the Slavonic races proclaimed in the cathedral of Moscow by Alexander, his ancestor — could not take place in his lifetime.”

Urquhart therefore thinks that the moment has now arrived when Russia will be dissolved in Slavonia, just as the Muscovite empire earlier merged into Russia.