Interior Minister A.A. Makarov and the newspaper campaign against Grigory Rasputin in public opinion (January-March 1912)

The article is devoted to the activities of the Minister of Internal Affairs A.A. Makarov during the newspaper campaign against Grigory Rasputin in January-March 1912. In preparation for the elections, the leader of the Octobrist party, A.I. Guchkov, decided to use attacks on the government and the supreme power as the main tool, one of which was a newspaper campaign against Grigory Rasputin, who was close to the imperial court. Nicholas II demanded that the Minister of Internal Affairs stop publications of this kind, however, Makarov could not fulfill the emperor's instructions, and the newspaper campaign stopped only in the spring of 1912 in connection with the events at the Lena gold mines. Public opinion reacted to the current situation by spreading persistent rumors about the imminent resignation of the Minister of the Interior, however, the emperor postponed the adoption of this decision. The study of this problem allows us to reconstruct one of the mechanisms of political struggle in the form of newspaper campaigns and assess its impact on the functioning of the "updated" state system in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. The methodological basis of the research is both general scientific methods (analysis, descriptive method) and general historical methods (historical-comparative, historical-systemic), which allows us to create a complete picture of the domestic political situation in Russia at the beginning of 1912. This study has a scientific novelty, since this problem is currently poorly studied and is mentioned in historiography in the context of other plots. In addition, the research is based on archival materials, as well as publications in periodicals of the early twentieth century, introduced into scientific circulation in recent times. The following conclusions were formulated in the course of the study: 1) The Rasputin theme temporarily left the pages of periodicals and did not lead to the immediate resignation of A.A. Makarov, but, nevertheless, significantly damaged the reputation of the minister in socio-political circles. 2) Nicholas II was somewhat disappointed in Makarov, since the newspaper campaign against Rasputin affected the private life of his family, and Makarov, in turn, could not comply with the emperor's request to stop publishing materials about the "Siberian elder".

Russian empire, Internal policy, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Alexandr Alexandrovich Makarov, Rasputin, Periodical press, Public opinion, Emperor Nicholas II, Vladimir Nikolaevich Kokovtsov, Oktobrists