The official materials are vast, not to speak of the personal ones. Each tsar wrote to ministers, lovers, relatives, simultaneously running foreign, domestic and cultural policies. This is a study of the dynasty, the interrelation of monarchy, family, court and, as it developed, the state – a survey of Russian political power from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. By the late nineteenth century, in addition to the colossal official correspondence of each tsar, most Romanovs and most ministers also kept diaries, wrote memoirs and of course many letters, and the family itself was enormous.
Memoirs must be treated with scepticism but letters and diaries are invaluable. Five priceless correspondences stand out: those between Peter the Great and his mistress-empress Catherine I; between Catherine the Great and her partner Potemkin; between Alexander I and his sister Catiche; between Alexander II and his mistress-wife Katya Dolgorukaya; and between Nicholas II and Alexandra. Some of these letters are already famous, such as a number of those of Catherine and Potemkin, and of Nicholas and Alexandra, yet both these couples wrote several thousand letters, varying from perfume-drenched love notes to long political discussions. Naturally most of them are little known. The correspondence of Alexander II and Katya Dolgorukaya numbers around 3,000 letters: it is overwhelmingly unpublished. Few historians have worked on this extraordinary trove and none has read it all, partly because the letters were for a long time in private hands and returned to the Russian archives relatively recently.
I follow twenty monarchs and several regents over three centuries. Out of the twenty tsars, three – Peter I, Catherine II and Nicholas II – are household names, while Rasputin has long since graduated from history to myth. But the less famous monarchs are just as fascinating. I aim to treat all the tsars equally, though the increasing volume of material along with the size of the family means that there is much more to cover in the last decades.
The greatest weight of pre-judgement and legend, martyrdom and romance hangs over Nicholas and Alexandra. Thousands of books have been written on every aspect of the last imperial couple, who have become a publishing-internet industry. The atrocious killing of the family both overshadows and over-illuminates their lives. After all, Nicholas and his family are now saints. Generations of biographers and bloggers portray Nicholas as a loving family man and, with his wife, as the definition of a romantic couple, but this study treats them and Rasputin as both intimate and political figures in a fresh, unvarnished way without the burden of plangent romance, Soviet disgust or liberal contempt.
In this titanic enterprise, I have been helped by many generous scholars and experts whose knowledge and judgement far outstrip mine. In the course of my researches into Catherine the Great, Potemkin and now the entire Romanov dynasty, over fifteen years, I have visited the great majority of Romanov palaces, many key sites, and state archives, from Moscow and Petersburg to Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo to Odessa, Tbilisi, Borzhomi, Baku, Sebastopol, Bakhtiserai, Yalta, Livadia, Dnieperpetrovsk, Nikolaev and Kherson, and have also accessed archives in foreign cities, London, Warsaw and Paris – too many to mention every curator, director and guide. But I must thank above all the Director of the State Hermitage Museum, Dr Mikhail Piotrovsky, the Director of the State Kremlin Museums, Dr Elena Gagarina, and the Director of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, GARF, Dr Sergei Mironenko.
I would also like to thank HRH the Prince of Wales, who has warmly and generously helped and encouraged my work in Russia and shared materials on the restoration of Romanov palaces; HRH the duke of Edinburgh, who kindly met me to discuss his family connections; HRH Prince Michael of Kent, who shared his experiences of the burial of Nicholas II and family; Princess Olga Romanoff, granddaughter of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich (Sandro) and Xenia Alexandrovna, who indulged my questions on the family; Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and her son Nick Balfour, who shared family photographs and letters; Princess Katya Galitzine; Countess Stefania Calice for her research into her family collection of letters and her sharing of unpublished Romanov letters including Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna’s account of Nicholas I’s death; Professor Catherine Merridale for advice and encouragement; Lars Tharp for Rasputin’s sea-cucumber; Adam Zamoyski for sharing gems of research on Nicholas I; Dr Mark Donen for researching the Comte de Langeron’s account of Paul’s murder in the Sorbonne archives; Ben Judah for sharing his research on Vladimir Putin’s reflections on Nicholas II; Helen Rappaport, author of Four Sisters, who warned me about the pitfalls of Romanov research; my dear friend Musa Klebnikov who shared the unpublished manuscript of her late, much-missed husband, Paul, on Stolypin; Galina Oleksiuk, who taught me Russian when I embarked on Catherine the Great and Potemkin, and her daughter Olesya Nova, who helped me with research, as well as the excellent young historian Lucy Morgan who did research for me in England. Above all I am enormously grateful to Dr Galina Babkova, who helped me research all my earlier books and who introduced me to the indispensable Daulet Zhandaryev, a most talented young historian, who helped me with the huge research. Thanks to the superb Peter James for his immaculate copyediting. I am lucky to have the support of a super-agent, Georgina Capel, and her outstanding colleagues Rachel Conway, Romily Withington and Valeria Huerta; and to have such fine publishers in my editors Bea Hemming and Holly Harley at Weidenfeld and Sonny Mehta at Knopf.
I thank the great Isabel de Madariaga, who, though she died before she could read this book, taught me, with the charming but stern rigour of Catherine the Great whom she resembled, how to write history and how to analyse Russia.
My father, Dr Stephen Sebag-Montefiore, died during the writing of this book. I deeply miss his wisdom and warmth in all matters – and his skill as an editor. Thanks to my mother April Sebag-Montefiore for her golden advice, literary gifts, and wonderful company. My parents-in-law Charles and Patty Palmer Tomkinson have as always been generous supporters. I am deeply grateful for the serenity, kindness, beauty, love and indulgence of my wife, Santa, who, having survived Stalin and Jerusalem, has now endured the Romanovs. I owe her everything: she is truly my tsarina. My inspirations are of course my darling children. Thank you, Lily and Sasha, for your delightful charm, mischief, irreverence and affection that has kept me going. My books are dedicated alternately to Santa and the children. This one is for Lily.
This book has unexpectedly touched my family history: my ancestor Sir Moses Montefiore met Emperors Nicholas I and Alexander II. My very existence is owed, if that is the word, to two of the tragedies of Russian-Jewish history. The family of my maternal grandmother, the Woolfs, fought for Poland against the Romanovs in 1863 then escaped to Britain. The family of my maternal grandfather, the Jaffes, fled Russia after the Kishinev pogrom in 1904. They bought tickets from Lithuania to New York then were surprised to be disembarked in Ireland. They had been tricked! When they protested, the people-smugglers explained they had promised to deliver them to ‘New Cork’, not New York. They settled in Limerick, where they were then driven out of their homes in a pogrom that took place in the British Isles in 1904. As I wrote about Gallipoli, I could not forget that my great-grandfather, Major Cecil Sebag-Montefiore, was left for dead there in a heap of bodies and never really recovered from his head wound, nor as I wrote about the Western intervention against the Bolsheviks in 1918 that his son, my grandfather, Colonel Eric Sebag-Montefiore, was a member of the British expedition that occupied Batumi. Such connections are of course commonplace – but somehow they help to add grit to the oyster.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
NOTE
For all Russian dates, I use the Julian Old Style calendar which in the seventeeth century was ten days behind the Gregorian New Style calendar used in the West; in the eighteenth century it was eleven days behind, in the nineteenth twelve days behind and in the twentieth thirteen days behind. For a small number of well-known dates, I use both.
On titles, I variously call the ruler by the titles tsar, autocrat, sovereign and grand prince until Peter the Great’s assump
tion of the title emperor. After that I use all of them interchangeably, though there was increasingly a Slavophile tone in using the Russian ‘tsar’ rather than the European–Roman ‘emperor’.
A tsar’s son was a tsarevich (‘son of the tsar’); a daughter was a tsarevna. Later all the children (and grandchildren) of monarchs were grand prince (veliki kniaz) and grand princess. These titles were traditionally translated as grand duke and grand duchess.
The crown prince was known as the heir (naslednik) but also more simply as grand duke and tsarevich (‘son of the tsar’). In 1721, Peter the Great, adopting the Roman title emperor, styled his children caesarevich (‘son of the Caesar’) or tsesarevich. I use the spelling caesarevich so that the reader can easily differentiate from tsarevich. In 1762, Catherine the Great styled her son Paul caesarevich and it became the title of the heir though the last tsar preferred the more Russian ‘tsarevich’.
To avoid long discussions of the changing meaning of the terms Slavophile and Pan-Slav, I use Slavophile generically to describe those who wished to use Russia’s Slavic identity to guide policy at home and abroad.
I use Constantinople not Istanbul for the Ottoman capital because that is what most contemporaries including Ottoman diplomats called it; I also used the Russian Tsargrad.
Russians are generally given a first name and their father’s name as patronymic. Thus the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich is Constantine son of Constantine. The Romanov names were often repeated so the family becomes increasingly complicated – even Nicholas II complained, ‘there are too many Constantines and Nicholases’, and there were also numerous Mikhails and Alexeis. I have tried to make this easier for the reader by using nicknames or different spellings, and including lists of characters with nicknames.
On Russian spelling, I use the most familiar version, so Tsar Michael instead of Mikhail, Peter instead of Piotr, Paul instead of Pavel. But I also at times use Nikolai and Mikhail. My decisions on all these questions are solely designed to make this puzzle comprehensible and to make characters recognizable. This leads to all sorts of linguistic inconsistencies to which I plead guilty.
PROLOGUE
Two Boys in a Time of Troubles
Two teenaged boys, both fragile, innocent and ailing, open and close the story of the dynasty. Both were heirs to a political family destined to rule Russia as autocrats, both raised in times of revolution, war and slaughter. Both were chosen by others for a sacred but daunting role that they were not suited to perform. Separated by 305 years, they played out their destinies in extraordinary and terrible scenarios that took place far from Moscow in edifices named Ipatiev.
At 1.30 a.m. on 17 July 1918, in the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, in the Urals, 800 miles east of Moscow, Alexei, aged thirteen, a sufferer from haemophilia, son of the former Tsar Nicholas II, was awakened with his parents, four sisters, three family retainers and three dogs, and told that the family must urgently prepare to move to a safer place.
At night on 13 March 1613, in the Ipatiev Monastery outside the half-ruined little town of Kostroma on the Volga River 200 miles northeast of Moscow, Michael Romanov, aged sixteen, a sufferer from weak legs and a tic in his eye, the only one of his parents’ five sons to survive, was awakened with his mother to be told that a delegation had arrived. He must prepare urgently to return with them to the capital.
Both boys were startled by the exceptional occasion that they would now confront. Their own parents had sought the paramount prize of the crown on their behalf – yet hoped to protect them from its perils. But they could not be protected because their family had, for better or worse, enrolled in the cruel game of hereditary power in Russia, and their weak shoulders were selected to bear the terrible burden of ruling. But for all the parallels between these transcendent moments in the lives of Alexei and Michael, they were, as we shall see, travelling in very different directions. One was the beginning and one was the end.
*
Alexei, a prisoner of the Bolsheviks, in a Russia shattered by savage civil war and foreign invasion, got dressed with his parents and sisters. Their clothes were woven with the famous jewels of the dynasty, secreted for a future escape into a new freedom. The boy and his father, the ex-tsar Nicholas II, both donned plain military shirts, breeches and peaked caps. Ex-tsarina Alexandra and her teenaged daughters all wore white blouses and black skirts, no jackets or hats. They were told to bring little with them, but they naturally tried to collect pillows, purses and keepsakes, unsure if they would return or where they were going. The parents knew they themselves were unlikely to emerge from this trauma with their lives, but even in that flint-hearted age, it would surely be unthinkable to harm innocent children. For now, befuddled by sleep, exhausted by living in despair and uncertainty, they suspected nothing.1
Michael Romanov and his mother, the Nun Martha, had recently been prisoners but were now almost fugitives, lying low, seeking sanctuary in a monastery amid a land also shattered by civil war and foreign invasion, not unlike the Russia of 1918. They too were accustomed to living in mortal danger. They were right to be afraid for the boy was being hunted by death squads.
In her mid-fifties, the Nun Martha, the boy’s mother, had suffered much in the brutal reversals of this, the Time of Troubles, which had seen their family fall from splendour and power to prison and death and back: the boy’s father, Filaret, was even now in Polish captivity; several uncles had been murdered. Michael was scarcely literate, decidedly unmasterful and chronically sick. He and his mother presumably just hoped to survive until his father returned. But would he ever return?
Mother and son, torn between dread and anticipation, told the delegation of grandees from Moscow to meet the boy outside the Ipatiev in the morning, unsure what the dawn would bring.2
The guards in the Ipatiev House of Ekaterinburg watched as the Romanovs came down the stairs, crossing themselves as they passed a stuffed female bear with two cubs on the landing. Nicholas carried his ailing son.
The commandant, a Bolshevik commissar named Yakov Yurovsky, led the family outside, across a courtyard and down into a basement, lit by a single electric bulb. Alexandra asked for a chair and Yurovsky had two brought for the two weakest members of the family: the ex-tsarina and Alexei. She sat on one chair and Nicholas set his son on the other. Then he stood in front of him. The four grand duchesses, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia – whose collective nickname was the acronym OTMA – stood behind Alexandra. Yurovsky hurried out of the room. There were many arrangements to make. For days, coded telegrams had clicked between Ekaterinburg and Moscow on the future of the imperial family as anti-Bolshevik forces, known as the Whites, advanced on Ekaterinburg. Time was running out. A death squad waited in the neighbouring room, some of its members drunk, all heavily armed. The family, serene and quiet, were still tousled and bemused with sleep, perhaps hoping that somehow during this rushed perambulation they would fall into the hands of the rescuing Whites who were so close. They sat facing the door calmly and expectantly as if they were waiting for a group photograph to be taken.
At dawn on 14 March, Michael, dressed in formal fur-lined robes and sable-trimmed hat, accompanied by his mother, emerged to watch a procession, led by Muscovite potentates, known as boyars, and Orthodox bishops, known as metropolitans. It was freezing cold. The delegates approached. The boyars wore kaftans and furs; the metropolitan bore the Miraculous Icon of the Dormition Cathedral, which Michael would have immediately recognized from the Kremlin where he had recently been a prisoner. As an additional persuasion, they held aloft the Fyodorov Mother of God, the Romanovs’ revered icon, the family’s protectress.
When they reached Michael and his mother, they bowed low, and their astonishing news was delivered in their first words to him. ‘Sovereign Lord, Lord of Vladimir and Moscow, and Tsar and Grand Prince of All Russia,’ said their leader Metropolitan Feodorit of Riazan. ‘Muscovy couldn’t survive without a sovereign . . . and Muscovy was in ruins,’ so an Assembly of the Land h
ad chosen him to be their sovereign who would ‘shine for the Russian Tsardom like the sun’, and they asked him to ‘show them his favour and not disdain to accept their entreaties’ and ‘deign to come to Moscow as quickly as possible’. Michael and his mother were not pleased. ‘They told us’, reported the delegates, ‘with great fury and crying that He did not wish to be Sovereign and She wouldn’t bless him to be Sovereign either and they walked off into the church.’ One can almost hear the magnificent anger of the mother and the sobbing confusion of the boy. In 1613, the crown of Russia was not a tempting proposition.
At 2.15 a.m., Alexei and family were still waiting in sleepy silence when Comrade Yurovsky and ten armed myrmidons entered the ever more crowded room. One of them noticed Alexei, ‘sickly and waxy’, staring ‘with wide curious eyes’. Yurovsky ordered Alexei and the family to stand and, turning to Nicholas, declared: ‘In view of the fact that your relatives continue their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Presidium of the Urals Regional Council has decided to sentence you to death.’
‘Lord oh my God!’ said the ex-tsar. ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ One of the girls cried out, ‘Oh my Lord, no!’ Nicholas turned back: ‘I can’t understand you. Read it again, please.’
The Moscow magnates were not discouraged by Michael’s refusal. The Assembly had written out the specific answers that the delegates were to give to each of Michael’s objections. After much praying, the grandees ‘almost begged’ Michael. They ‘kissed the Cross and humbly asked’ the boy they called ‘our Sovereign’ if he would be the tsar. The Romanovs were wounded after years of persecution and humiliation. They were lucky to be alive. Michael again ‘refused with a plaintive cry and rage’.
Yurovsky read out the death sentence again and now Alexei and the others crossed themselves while Nicholas kept saying, ‘What? What?’
The Romanovs Page 3
