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Milioutine never returned to St. Petersburg after that day. He retired to the Crimea, where he possessed a villa, and never more turned his attention towards public affairs, preserving a dignified silence both as to his wrongs and to his political activity in the past. The present Sovereign made him a Count, and later on conferred upon him the dignity of Field-Marshal. When the Count was in the Crimea, Nicholas II. never forgot to visit the old veteran, living so quietly amongst his roses and the many flowers of his garden. There he died at the beginning of 1912, two days after his wife, at the advanced age of ninety-four, having kept unimpaired to the last his brilliant qualities and his remarkable intelligence. Few statesmen have had the dignity of Count Milioutine; few have known better how to behave when in power, and to live when out of it.

Of a different type from the General was Count Panine, who at the time of the emancipation of the serfs held the portfolio of Justice. He was a grand seigneur in the fullest sense of the term, un homme d’autrefois immutable in his principles, and who, when he saw he could no longer please his Sovereign, retired rather, as he himself said, “than bow his grey head before the idol of progress.” Panine was the embodiment of that type of Russian functionary that will not admit a change of regime, and that look upon every reform as a danger. He was thoroughly retrogressive in all his opinions, and Liberalism or Liberty meant for him merely Revolution. He firmly believed that every concession made to the spirit of modern times was a danger to the Throne, and he was perhaps the only man who had the courage to tell Alexander II. so, and to retire from power rather than lend his hand to what he considered to be the degradation of that system of autocracy which he had defended during the whole of his long life.