The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Alexander sought peace without losing honour or territory. Napoleon sought mastery over Europe with a junior partner. These sons of the Enlightenment were dreamers as well as pragmatists. War, Napoleon explained, was not ‘a difficult art’ but ‘a matter of hiding fear as long as possible. Only by this means is one’s enemy intimidated and success not in doubt.’ Alexander praised elective republics and criticized hereditary monarchy which he regarded as irrational – except in Russia, where local conditions made it essential. Napoleon, the parvenu emperor who had been elected by plebiscite to the throne of a guillotined king, defended heredity to the dynastic autocrat who had acquiesced in paternal regicide. ‘Who is fit to be elected?’ asked Napoleon. ‘A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance.’

  ‘At Tilsit, I chattered away,’ admitted Napoleon. As the two of them bargained over new kingdoms and spheres, Alexander asked for Constantinople. ‘Constantinople is the empire of the world,’ replied Napoleon gnomically. ‘I called the Turks barbarians and said they ought to be turned out of Europe,’ he recalled. He played on Alexander’s fantasies, suggesting a joint march eastwards to take Constantinople and then attack British India. ‘But I never intended to do so,’ Napoleon admitted later. Alexander, who understood the game, later called this ‘the language of Tilsit’.

  On 25 June, Lobanov, Paul’s minister Kurakin and Talleyrand signed the Treaty of Tilsit. Alexander lost no territory but relinquished the Ionian Islands and Wallachia and Moldavia, recognized Napoleon’s brothers as kings of Westphalia and Naples, and promised to blockade England. Prussia suffered grievously, but Alexander refused to annex Prussian Poland. Instead Napoleon created a grand duchy of Warsaw, a possible Polish base against Russia.

  ‘God has saved us,’ Alexander boasted to Catiche.

  ‘As long as I live, I shan’t get used to knowing you pass your days with Bonaparte,’ Catiche replied. ‘It seems like a bad joke.’ A worse joke was mooted. Napoleon’s marriage with Josephine was childless so, keen to found his own dynasty, he contemplated divorce. Talleyrand sounded out Alexander about a marriage to Catiche, who was already considering matrimony with another suitor, Emperor Francis of Austria, but the tsar thought him dull – and dirty. ‘Then I can wash him,’ replied Catiche, who added that he certainly would not be dull after marrying her. When Napoleon was mentioned, ‘I wept hot tears like a calf,’ she admitted. ‘Princes are of two kinds – worthy people with scant brains and clever ones but of hateful character.’ The former were preferable but ‘if the divorce came about’ and Napoleon asked for her, she ‘owed that sacrifice to the State’. Napoleon was not yet single – but Catiche, to avoid him, had to marry fast.

  As they parted, Alexander invited Napoleon to Petersburg: ‘I’ll order his quarters warmed to Egyptian heat.’ The summit resembled one of those short love affairs in which both lovers promise eternal love even though both know they will ultimately return to their real lives. Looking back at the end of his life, Napoleon reflected that ‘Perhaps I was happiest at Tilsit.’ As for Alexander, his days with Napoleon seemed ‘like a dream’, he told Catiche. ‘It’s past midnight and he’s just left. Oh I wish you could have witnessed all that happened.’ But given his appalling hand, ‘Instead of sacrifices, we got out of the struggle with a sort of lustre.’

  His mother and his brother Constantine led the opposition to the new French alliance, much to Elizabeth’s outrage: the family had ‘betrayed and sold the emperor’. After her affair with Czartoryski, the twenty-eight-year-old Elizabeth had fallen in love with a Guards captain, Alexis Okhotnikov, aged twenty-three, and become pregnant. This infuriated the unstable Constantine, who, devoted to Alexander, almost certainly ordered the captain’s murder (without the tsar’s knowledge): Okhotnikov was stabbed coming out of the theatre. The empress visited him before he died and afterwards gave birth to a daughter Lisinka, her delight. But Lisinka died at the age of two, leaving Elizabeth poleaxed.5

  As Petersburg seethed against the French, Alexander promoted* Arakcheev to war minister to reform the army. Arakcheev served as his ‘guard-dog with his obtuse ferocity and unconditional loyalty’. Utterly trusted and universally loathed as ‘the Vampire’, he ran Alexander’s chancellery, able to sign on the emperor’s behalf. Simultaneously, Alexander promoted the Ape’s opposite, Mikhail Speransky, son of a village priest, who had himself studied for the priesthood. This liberal humanist was made deputy justice minister, but he quickly became Alexander’s state secretary. He proposed an almost American system with a presidential tsar, semi-elected legislature and independent judiciary, linked together by a council of state. He openly criticized serfdom and his measures implied that nobles needed some qualifications to take part in government. Speransky’s humble origins, dynamic reforms and Francophile culture created enemies. There had been many favourites before – and all had been co-opted by marriage and interest into the clans of nobility, but Speransky’s ideas were a threat to their privilege of being born to govern, command and own serfs. ‘With just a third of Speransky’s brain,’ sneered his rival Arakcheev, ‘I’d be a very great man.’

  While society plotted against his French policy, Alexander welcomed Napoleon’s ambassadors, first Savary, duc de Rovigo, and then Armand de Caulaincourt, duc de Vicenza, as if these Bonapartist henchmen were his friends. Then, as chinks started to show in French invincibility, Napoleon invited Alexander as his star guest at a new summit.

  ‘My Alexander,’ wrote his mother, begging him not to go, ‘you’re guilty of criminal self-deception.’

  ‘We will do everything to prove the sincerity’ of Russia’s ‘tight alliance with France, this fearful colossus’, replied Alexander to his mother – until ‘the moment when we will calmly observe his fall. The wisest policy is to await the right moment to take measures.’ He could only follow ‘the indications of my conscience, my essential conviction, the desire that has never left me to be useful to my country’.

  On 17 September 1808, Alexander (accompanied by Speransky) was greeted by Napoleon five miles outside Erfurt. As well as the two emperors, there were four kings and a constellation of other German princes attending this three-week demonstration of the panoply of Napoleonic power – but it was all about Russia and France. During their eighteen days together, the two emperors banqueted, hunted, danced and attended illuminations and the theatre: when one of the actors onstage in the play Oedipus declaimed ‘A great man’s friendship is the gift of the gods,’ Alexander turned and presented his hand to Napoleon to the applause of the entire audience. Napoleon, a born actor himself, half admired Alexander’s thespian talents, calling him the ‘Talma of the North’ after the top French actor.

  But Napoleon grumbled because Alexander had become ‘stubborn as a mule’. Alexander was treated to his first Napoleonic tantrum, with the imperial foot stamping on the imperial hat. ‘You’re violent and I am stubborn,’ said Alexander. ‘Let us talk and be reasonable – or I leave.’ Napoleon noticed that ‘he plays deaf when things are said he is reluctant to hear’. Alexander was slightly deaf, but there was plenty he did not wish to hear. The Russians disliked the grand duchy of Warsaw and Napoleon’s Continental System, a blockade of British trade which was damaging the Russian economy. Alexander took the opportunity to demand rewards. Napoleon offered Russia the very same tidbits offered by Hitler to Stalin in similar circumstances in 1939: Moldavia and Wallachia ‘as part of the Russian empire’ and Finland, then a Swedish duchy. ‘It’s not right that the beauties of Petersburg should be interrupted by Swedish cannon,’ Napoleon generously reflected. In return, Alexander promised to uphold the Continental System against Britain and support Napoleon if attacked by Austria.

  Yet Alexander’s vision of himself as a European crusader was encouraged by a traitor at the heart of Napoleon’s court. Napoleon had recently sacked his foreign minister, the lame and reptilian Talleyrand. He still admired ‘the man with the most ideas, the most flair’, though he h
ad recently called him ‘shit in a silk stocking’ to his face. Now appointed to the sinecure office of vice-grand-elector, Talleyrand secretly betrayed him to the tsar – for cash. ‘Sire, it is up to you to save Europe,’ he told Alexander, ‘and you won’t manage unless you resist Napoleon. The French people are civilized, their sovereign is not; the sovereign of Russia is civilized, but his people are not. Thus it is up to the sovereign of Russia to be the ally of the French people.’

  Napoleon had one more demand. ‘I tell you of one of the most grievous plights in which I ever found myself,’ Alexander told Catiche.* ‘Napoleon is obtaining a divorce and casting an eye on Anne.’ Their youngest sister Annette was just fourteen. ‘Mother’, wrote Alexander ‘showed more calm over it than I should have believed.’ Maria concluded, ‘How wretched would the child’s existence be united to a man of villainous character to whom nothing is sacred and without restraint since he does not believe in God? And would this sacrifice profit Russia? All of that makes me shudder.’ Alexander thought ‘the right course is hard to choose.’ Napoleon did not realize the Russians regarded him as a fiend. ‘I’m happy with Alexander; I think he is with me,’ he told Josephine. ‘Were he a woman, I think I’d make him my lover.’6

  That love was soon to be tested. After his return, Alexander was more interested in promoting reform at home and seizing his own prizes abroad to rescue his damaged prestige. He launched his Swedish war to gobble up the Swedes’ province of Finland which would safeguard the approaches to Petersburg. By February 1808, the Russian troops were floundering, so Alexander sent in Arakcheev. The Vampire reorganized the armies, enabling Alexander’s best generals, the dependable Mikhail Barclay de Tolly and the ferocious Prince Bagration, to cross the ice and assault Stockholm. The Swedes agreed to cede Finland, which became a Russian grand duchy until 1917. ‘The peace is perfect,’ Alexander boasted to Catiche, ‘and absolutely the one I wanted. I cannot thank the Supreme Being enough.’7

  Napoleon now discovered the limits of his Russian alliance. In April 1809, Emperor Francis again went to war against Napoleon. Alexander fulfilled his promises by despatching 70,000 troops but with instructions not to help the French in the slightest. ‘It’s not an alliance I have here,’ fulminated Napoleon. ‘I’ve been duped.’ At Wagram, Napoleon defeated the Austrians.

  In November, Napoleon offered Alexander a settlement of the Polish question – in return for his own betrothal to Annette. ‘My sister could not do better,’ lied the tsar to Caulaincourt. Alexander started negotiating a ‘reciprocal agreement never to permit the re-establishment of Poland’. The French agreed, but when Alexander insisted that Annette could not marry for two years, Napoleon reneged on the Polish deal, and instead married Emperor Francis’s daughter Archduchess Marie-Louise. Annette was saved from the Corsican ogre, but the Romanovs had been insulted.

  As for Napoleon, he started to despise Alexander with that special hatred reserved for the beloved mistress who ends a cherished affair. Napoleon insulted him as ‘a shifty Byzantine’ and ‘a Greek of the lower empire, fake as a coin’, comments that have defined Alexander ever since. Yet every ruler in Europe had to dissemble their real views and compromise with Napoleon: it was Napoleon’s Icaran vanity that deluded him into believing that any of them meant their diplomatic expressions of loyalty. Alexander was a pragmatist living (and trying to stay alive and on his throne) in dangerous times who survived because of that same versatility which others might called dissembling. ‘His personality is by nature well meaning, sincere and loyal, and his sentiments and principles are elevated,’ observed Caulaincourt, ‘but beneath all this there exists an acquired royal dissimulation and a dogged persistence that nothing will overcome.’8

  Alexander and Napoleon were now preparing for war: there was no time to waste.

  As Arakcheev toiled to improve the army, Speransky had proposed his reform of autocracy, so radical that nothing even approaching it would be conceded until 1905. Alexander half accepted it, creating a new Council of State and a nominal committee of ministers but, under attack from all sides, he continued to rule autocratically, as he had always done. Yet even this limited reform was a triumph for Speransky.

  Vampire Arakcheev, a strangely thin-skinned melodramatist, jealously resigned as war minister in a disingenuous letter: ‘Sire, don’t be angry with a man who’s lived half his life without using flattery . . . You know the limits of my education which is why I feel I’m nothing more than a good officer . . .’

  ‘I cannot hide from you my great surprise . . . Allow me to leave aside the title I bear and speak to you as a man to whom I am personally attached,’ replied an irritated Alexander, who needed Arakcheev. ‘At a time when I expect ardent and zealous help from all honest people, you abandon me, preferring your personal vanity.’

  They were reconciled when Alexander visited Arakcheev’s estate, Gruzino. ‘It’s a truly charming place,’ Alexander told Catiche. ‘The order that reigns here is unique . . . I’m sure there’s nothing like it in the empire . . . The village streets have just that sort of tidiness that pleases me so much.’ But its bleak militaristic perfection came at a price.

  Arakcheev ruled his serfs cruelly, grading his punishments: a whipping for a first offence but, for a second, a thrashing by his soldiers using clubs known as ‘Arakcheev sticks’. Each serf carried a punishment book in which Arakcheev wrote comments such as: ‘If she doesn’t know her prayers by Lent, I’ll have her soundly whipped.’ The estate was really run by the extraordinary figure of Anastasia Minkina, a jet-haired serf girl who had been bought by Arakcheev and then manumitted. ‘Plump, with a grenadier’s figure and fiery black eyes’, she became housekeeper, mistress and then the mother of an illegitimate son. Afterwards Arakcheev married a young noble girl in Petersburg who was so horrified by his tyranny that she quickly left him. Afterwards he stuck to collecting pornography, while in Gruzino Minkina was allowed to terrorize his serfs with all the sadistic zeal of someone who had escaped their ranks.

  Arakcheev refused to return as war minister but agreed to supervise his successor, Barclay de Tolly, from the Council of State as they prepared the army for war. In July 1810, Queen Louise of Prussia died, supposedly weakened by Napoleon’s defeat of her nation. Alexander declared, ‘I swear to avenge her death.’ He considered an offensive against Napoleon. In December 1810, their relationship deteriorated further when Napoleon annexed Oldenburg, the duchy of Catiche’s father-in-law. While neither wanted war, Alexander told him, if it came, ‘I will know how to fight.’ Napoleon hectored him about infringements of the British blockade – and started to plan an invasion of Russia.

  Alexander sought Prussian support and obtained a promise from the Austrians that if they fielded a corps against Russia it would not actually fight. To the north, he allied himself with Sweden,* but to the south his troops struggled to defeat the Ottomans. That December, Alexander discussed with Czartoryski the creation of a Polish kingdom (with himself as king) to fight the French, but the prince shot down the tsar’s plan: ‘the French and Poles are brothers’ while the Russians were Poland’s ‘bitterest enemies’.

  Napoleon and Alexander now learned of each other’s offensive plans. ‘Everything is assuming a dark hue here,’ Alexander told Catiche in January 1811. ‘It seems blood will flow but I have done all humanly possible to avoid it.’9

  ‘What can reasonably be hoped of Napoleon?’ Alexander asked Catiche on 5 July 1811. ‘Is he the man to relinquish a gain unless by force of arms? And have we the means to compel him?’ The pressure was punishing. ‘Never have I led such a dog’s life,’ he told his sister on 10 November. ‘Often in the week I get out of bed to sit at my desk and leave it only to eat a morsel alone and then go back until I go to bed.’ Arakcheev and Barclay increased the army’s size, adopting the corps and division systems, ordered munitions, built fortifications, modernized the artillery, while Alexander, aided by Speransky, weighed the intelligence sent by his spymasters in Paris.† ‘We’re on contin
ual alert,’ he told Catiche. ‘Hostilities may start at any moment.’

  ‘I will not be the first to draw the sword,’ he told Caulaincourt, ‘but I will be the last to put it back in its sheath. If the fortune of war runs against me, I’d rather withdraw to Kamchatka [in eastern Siberia] than cede provinces.’ Caulaincourt was impressed: ‘People believe him to be weak but they are wrong,’ he informed Paris. ‘His amenable personality has limits and he won’t go beyond them: these limits are as strong as iron.’ When Caulaincourt returned to Paris, he spent five hours trying to convince Napoleon not to attack Russia. ‘One good battle’, retorted Napoleon, ‘will see the end of all your friend Alexander’s fine resolutions.’

  Catiche, who now lived in Tver where her husband was governor, was one of the few with whom the tsar could discuss how to face the coming invasion. ‘I am here on sentry duty,’ Alexander told her on 21 November 1811. ‘Alas, I cannot use my ancient rights (it’s your feet in question do you hear) to imprint most tender kisses in your bedroom at Tver.’ Incestuous foot-kissing aside, they discussed how to confront such an enemy, considering all outcomes – even losing Petersburg and Moscow. ‘You will recall I often foresaw’ such sacrifices, he later wrote. ‘The actual loss of the two capitals was believed to be possible.’

  Alexander created a police ministry (another idea copied from Napoleon) under Alexander Balashov, whose spies reported discontent on every side. Catiche presided over a patriotic salon at her palace in Tver. She extended her patronage to the historian Nikolai Karamzin whose Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia provided the intellectual ballast in her campaign against all things French, liberal – or connected to Speransky. Catiche’s ally, once Paul’s minister, Rostopchin told Alexander that ‘Even if unfortunate circumstances forced us to retreat, the Russian emperor would still be menacing in Moscow, terrifying in Kazan and invincible in Tobolsk.’10