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intimately acquainted with each of them and caring for their every need. He was praised for his modest lifestyle and his simple tastes, his accessibility to the common people, his kindness and his wisdom. A popular biography of Nicholas was commissioned especially for the jubilee, the first ever published of a living Tsar. It portrayed him as the 'father of his people, over whose needs he keeps an earnest and compassionate watch'. He was said to devote 'special care and attention to the welfare and moral development' of the peasants, whose huts he frequently entered 'to see how they live and to partake of their milk and black bread'. At official functions he 'talked genially' with the peasants, who then 'crossed themselves and felt happier for the rest of their lives'. He shared the people's simple habits and pursuits, wore a peasant blouse and ate humble peasant dishes such as borscht and blinies. During the jubilee the Tsar was photographed in symbolic acts of homage to the people, such as inspecting a new type of plough or tasting the rations of his soldiers.
    Such images were calculated to reinforce the popular myth that nothing, however trivial, in the people's daily lives escaped the attention of the Tsar and that his influence was everywhere. 'Thousands of invisible threads centre in the Tsar's heart,' wrote the royal biographer; 'and these threads stretch to the huts of the poor and the palaces of the rich.
    And that is the reason why the Russian people always acclaims its Tsar with such fervent enthusiasm, whether in St Petersburg in the Marinsky Theatre ... or on his way through the towns and villages.'11
    * * * 'Now you can see for yourself what cowards those state ministers are,' the Empress Alexandra told a lady-in-waiting shortly after the jubilee. 'They are constantly frightening the Emperor with threats of revolution and here — you see it for yourself —
    we need merely to show ourselves and at once their hearts are ours.' If the rituals of the jubilee were intended to create the illusion of a mighty and stable dynasty, then they had convinced few people except the court itself. The Romanovs became victims of their own propaganda. Nicholas, in particular, returned from his tour of the provinces confirmed in the self-delusion that 'My people love me.' It aroused a fresh desire to travel in the Russian interior. He talked of a boat trip down the Volga, a visit to the Caucasus and Siberia. Emboldened by the belief in his own popularity, he began to look for ways of moving one step closer towards the system of personal rule which he so admired in ancient Muscovy. Encouraged by his more reactionary ministers, he even considered dissolving the Duma altogether or turning it into a purely consultative body such as the Land Assembly (Zemskii Sobor) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
    Foreign observers friendly to the monarchy were just as easily swept along by the rosy rhetoric. 'No hope seems too confident or too bright,' the London Times pronounced on the Romanovs' future in a special edition on the jubilee. Convinced of the people's devotion to the Tsar, it reported that a series of postage stamps with portraits of the Romanov rulers had been issued to mark the tercentenary but had been withdrawn when some royalist post-office clerks refused to impress the obliterating postmark on these hallowed visages. 'These loyal and eminently respectable scruples', concluded The Times, 'are typical of the mind of the vast masses of the Russian people.' Such sentiments were echoed by the British Foreign Office. 'Nothing could exceed the affection and devotion to the person of the Emperor displayed by the population wherever His Majesty appeared. There is no doubt that in this strong attachment of the masses ... to the person of the Emperor lies the great strength of the Russian autocracy.'12
    In fact, the jubilee took place in the midst of a profound social and political crisis —
    some would even say a revolutionary