The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Castlereagh feared nothing less than an exchange of Napoleonic hegemony for that of Romanov imperium and advised Liverpool, again sounding very like twenty-first-century statesmen dealing with modern Russia, that only strength not appeasement would work with Alexander: ‘Acquiescence will not keep him back nor will opposition accelerate his march.’ It was necessary ‘to watch him and resist him if necessary as another Bonaparte’.

  Alexander’s bullying played into the hands of Talleyrand, who persuaded Britain and Austria to join France in a secret anti-Russian entente, signed on 9 December. Two days later, an oblivious emperor gave a ball for his birthday at the Razumovsky Palace, where Beethoven played for the last time. Finally the Polish issue was agreed: Alexander became the constitutional king of Poland under the crown of Russia. But the Saxon question became so embittered that there was talk of war with Russia, until Alexander finally agreed to leave a rump of Saxony. The danger of a new conflagration was symbolically manifested on New Year’s Eve when the Razumovsky Palace caught fire. As his priceless paintings were consumed by the flames, Razumovsky, wearing a sable dressing-gown, wept under a tree, comforted by Alexander.

  The Congress has a bad reputation for its dissolute behaviour and conservative diplomacy, but its peace, however aristocratic and monarchical, was a sensible, pragmatic settlement, much more enduring than its twentieth-century equivalent, the unrealistic and idealistic Treaty of Versailles of 1919. Nonetheless the tsar was so disgusted by the cynical horsetrading (in other words, the resistance to his own sacred wishes) that he conceived a Holy Alliance, a Christian brotherhood of monarchs – and he was just about to propose this when amazing news arrived.

  ‘An unexpected event, Mama, that will astonish you as much as it has us, has just given a different direction to all ideas,’ he reported to his mother. ‘Napoleon left his island of Elba on 26 February.’ He was once again emperor of the French.

  It was Metternich who had rushed to break the news to Alexander. The tsar, ready to face Napoleon in battle, offered himself as dictator of the alliance with the king of Prussia, Schwarzenberg and the duke of Wellington as his deputies. But Wellington, who had now replaced Castlereagh in Vienna, said he would ‘prefer to carry a musket’ himself rather than serve under the tsar.

  As Russian, Prussian, Austrian and British troops massed on French borders and the final Congress treaty was signed,* the odds were against the Corsican monster. ‘A mass of 850,000 men’, the tsar told his mother, ‘are ready to crush the evil genius.’22

  As Alexander mustered his armies at Heilbronn in Germany, Catiche arranged for him to meet the priestess of his new sphere of mysticism. On 4 June 1815, he received Baroness Juliana Krüdener, a fifty-year-old Baltic German noblewoman (great-granddaughter of Marshal Münnich) and wife of a Russian diplomat who claimed mystical powers to contact God directly and foresee the imminent Apocalypse. Such chiliastic cults were fashionable and Alexander, already steeped in mysticism, had heard of Krüdener’s prophecy that the downfall of the anti-Christ Napoleon would, directed by a certain angelic monarch, herald the Second Coming. Krüdener’s sly millenarian flattery, expressed in biblical gobbledegook, dovetailed with Alexander’s self-righteous egomania. ‘My obeisances to Virginia [his nickname for Krüdener],’ Alexander wrote to Catiche. ‘Tell her my devotion to her is undying.’

  On 6 June (18 June New Style), Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. This time, Alexander would take no chances with Napoleon. ‘We shall insist’, he told Barclay, ‘on having him turned over to us.’ But having earlier learned of the secret anti-Russian alliance, he was repelled by Paris – ‘this accursed place’.

  Staying at the Elysée Palace, he invited Baroness Krüdener to come to Paris as his spiritual guide. She arrived with a Cossack escort and lodged at the Hôtel Montchenu next door to facilitate their nightly prayer sessions. ‘I saw only a desire to beat poor France and a wish to give rein to that passion of vengeance which I despise,’ he told Catiche. ‘My only consolations flow from the Supreme Being.’ Alexander insisted that France should not be penalized by the allies* and he proposed the Holy Alliance, guaranteed by the monarchs living together as Christian brethren – ‘to apply’, Alexander explained to one of his diplomats, ‘the principles of peace, concord and love which are the fruit of Christian religion and morality to the political relationships of states’.

  On 29 August, Alexander presided over his Review of Virtues, a parade of 150,000 Russians, attended by the monarchs of Austria and Prussia as well as by Wellington, the comte d’Artois (Louis XVIII’s brother) and Krüdener, grey-haired and plainly dressed. Next day his entire army sang Slavonic hymns, then prostrated themselves before seven altars. ‘This’, he told the baroness, ‘has been the most beautiful day of my life.’

  ‘The emperor’s mind is not quite sound,’ Castlereagh told Liverpool. When Alexander showed the treaty to him and Wellington, ‘it was not without difficulty we went through the interview with becoming gravity’. It was a ‘piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’. Britain resisted, but most of Europe signed.23

  In October 1815, Alexander, the new king of Poland, entered Warsaw in Polish uniform and granted his new kingdom a constitution, giving Poles the sort of liberties that he never offered the Russians. The pupil of Laharpe saw the Polish constitution as a test, confiding in the Prussian General von Borstell, ‘Poland is necessary to me for the civilization of my empire.’ The weary Alexander, swinging between fluffy liberalism and irascible autocracy, returned to Petersburg in time for Christmas.

  The tsar had always recognized the evil of serfdom. Now his prestige was so high that he was tempted to abolish it. The next year, he actually liberated the serfs of Livonia, a bold move, and commissioned Novosiltsev, Kochubey and even Arakcheev to present plans for Russia proper, which was a much more complicated and sensitive matter.

  When some liberal nobles submitted plans to free their own serfs after the Livonian reform Alexander asked: ‘To whom does legislative power belong?’

  ‘Without doubt to Your Imperial Majesty.’

  ‘In that case,’ snapped Alexander, ‘recognize my right to legislate as I consider most useful for the good of my subjects.’ Reform could come only from the autocrat, and even then it had its limits.

  Metternich complained that the tsar ‘is incapable of persevering in the same system of ideas’, having ‘left Jacobinism to embrace mysticism’, while ‘the Rights of Man are replaced by Bible-reading’. But actually he had already tired of Baroness Krüdener. She had boasted unwisely of her powers over him. He never saw her again.

  Instead it was the militaristic autocrat who now promoted a vast new project at home – to settle soldiers and their families in military colonies, inspired partly by Arakcheev’s estate, where they could support themselves by farming which would reduce the colossal expense of Europe’s biggest army and reduce the cruelties of the existing conscription system. It was an excellent idea in principle – but not in execution. ‘The emperor had the idea,’ recalled the wife of his brother Nicholas, ‘but the execution was entrusted to Arakcheev.’ Soon a third of soldiers in the Russian army and their families lived in these colonies. Arakcheev and his thuggish martinets ‘did not do it gently’, wrote Nicholas’s wife, ‘but on the contrary with hard and cruel measures that made the peasants discontented’. The Vampire became the project’s fanatical administrator, reporting every detail to the grateful emperor.

  The restless Alexander set off on a tour of the empire, the first of many. Overall, he would travel an astonishing 160,000 miles, inspecting provinces or attending foreign congresses.* These congresses were summit meetings held frequently by the Concert of Europe, the victors of the war, led by Alexander himself, to maintain peace. Loathing ceremony, bored by Petersburg rigmarole, spoiled by success, no longer consoled by sex, glory or mysticism, tormented by the memory of his father and suffering from a niggling, paranoiac uneasiness that sometimes approached frenzy, he travelled with a tiny entour
age of just Dr Wylie and Volkonsky.* His first tour to the ruins of Moscow was probably the most effective of his reign for he ordered his architect, Joseph Bove, to rebuild the city centre: the Bolshoi, Theatre Square, the University and Red Square that we see today are Alexander’s most enduring legacy.

  Then, in 1819, some 28,000 military colonists rebelled, only to be brutally repressed by Arakcheev. ‘I saw decisiveness and prompt action is needed,’ he reported to his tsar, by which he meant draconian Prussian-style military punishments. Two thousand were arrested; 275 sentenced to death, commuted to running the atrocious Spitsruten. These unfortunates ran twelve times down the so-called ‘green street’ of a thousand beaters; 160 perished. ‘You could only tell by their heads’, wrote a witness, ‘that these were men and not slaughtered meat.’

  ‘I understand what your sensitive soul must have undergone,’ Alexander reassured Arakcheev, ‘but I appreciate your good judgement.’ Alexander approved Arakcheev’s brutality, supposedly saying, ‘These colonies will be created, whatever they cost, even if it’s necessary to cover with bodies the road from Petersburg to Choudova.’ But he insisted, ‘I’ve mastered harder problems and I mean to be obeyed on this one.’

  Across Europe, in Spain, Portugal, Germany and France, revolutionary ideas, disseminated by secret societies, threatened the Holy Alliance. Even Britain experienced radical unrest and the Peterloo Massacre. The assassination of the French heir, the duc de Berry, alarmed Alexander so much that he now demanded a concert of European monarchs to enforce a ‘general system’. The British and Austrians still resisted a doctrine of intervention, both fearing Russian power, until a revolution broke out in Naples.

  In October 1820, Alexander, accompanied by his brother Nicholas, met Francis and Frederick William at Troppau, where it was Metternich who now proposed a doctrine of conservative intervention to crush the revolutions across Europe. In a last flaring of his liberalism, it was now Alexander who opposed this until, on 28 October, he received disturbing news that changed his entire attitude. His beloved Semyonovsky Guards had mutinied. Revolution threatened Russia.24

  *

  The mutiny was a reaction to the brutality of an oafish German colonel, a protégé of Arakcheev, but Alexander saw it as the tentacle of an octopus-like revolutionary conspiracy – ‘the Empire of Evil which spreads swiftly using all the occultish means of the satanic genius who directs it’. Still at Troppau, Alexander, working through Arakcheev, ordered harsh punishments: ‘The emperor has deigned to spare these men the knout [but] he orders the infliction of 6,000 blows of the birch to each, after which they will be sent to forced labour in the mines.’ Many died on ‘green street’.

  As Alexander and Metternich moved their congress southwards to Laibach, so that the king of Naples could join them, the tsar embraced the Austrian’s plan to crush ‘the empire of evil’ in Naples – and anywhere else. ‘Isn’t it our duty as Christians to struggle against this enemy and his infernal work with all our power and all the means that Divine Providence has placed in our hands?’ he wrote to Golitsyn in a multipaged rant. ‘I would say the real evil is more dangerous still than the devastating despotism even of Napoleon.’ Alexander was convinced that there was a dastardly international conspiracy directed from Paris by a revolutionary organization called the Comité Central. Alexander did not yet know that there were indeed secret societies even within his own Guards, made up of liberal nobles who had returned from Paris determined to overthrow the autocracy.

  In 1816, thirty well-connected officers formed the Union of Salvation. This then divided into a Northern Society, which planned a constitutional monarchy based on the US presidency, and a more radical Southern Society, established in the Ukrainian army, which decided to assassinate the emperor. The membership of these cells overlapped with that of the Arzamas Society, a self-congratulatory literary club of dilettantes, some liberal, some conservative. One of its founders, the romantic poet Vasily Zhukovsky, spotted real poetic talent: he proposed the election of a boy who had just left Alexander’s lycée at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexander Pushkin’s mother was the daughter of Hannibal, ‘the Negro of Peter the Great’, while his father was the scion of an old boyar family. Blessed with exotic looks, black curly hair and a lithe figure, Pushkin made his name with the romantic poem Ruslan and Ludmilla. Dreaming of freedom, the boy mingled with the bewhiskered heroes of the Napoleonic Wars, some of whom were planning revolution. The irreverent Pushkin entertained the salons with his many seductions and outrageous satires. He vilified the vampiric Arakcheev* and dared mock Alexander, ‘the wandering despot’ with a ‘plump posterior’.

  In 1819, Alexander, on first hearing about this prodigy, asked the Guards commander Prince Ilarion Vasilchikov for a Pushkin poem. He liked what he read, thanking Pushkin for his ‘noble sentiments’ – but the next year an informer denounced the poet to Kochubey, who informed the fat-bottomed tsar. General Miloradovich, governor-general of Petersburg in charge of one branch of the secret police, was ordered to confiscate the verses, but Pushkin burned them first. Yet with fearless honesty the poet agreed to write them out again. ‘Pushkin must be exiled to Siberia,’ said the emperor; ‘he’s flooded Russia with seditious verse.’ The poet Zhukovsky and historian Karamzin – the two court intellectuals – and even the dowager empress appealed on Pushkin’s behalf. Instead Alexander exiled Pushkin to New Russia.

  Pushkin was the least of his problems: now a Guards officer close to the family named Alexander Benckendorff denounced a skein of conspiracies to the tsar. Finally returning to Tsarskoe in May 1821, Alexander was greeted by Guards commander Vasilchikov, chief of another security agency, who confirmed the conspiracies. Surprisingly Alexander did not order hangings. ‘My dear Vasilchikov, you know I have shared and encouraged these illusions and mistakes. So it’s not for me to crush them.’

  That would be left to his successor. But who would that be?25

  On the very night of his father’s assassination, the official heir, Constantine, had said that he did not want the throne – and he had not changed his mind since. He was still a sadistic martinet and volatile hellion, unsuited to be tsar. While showing off his troops to foreigners, he pierced the foot of a general standing at attention with his sword to prove his discipline. True, he seemed to have improved. He quoted Molière in letters to his sisters, laughed at his own pug-nosed ugliness and enjoyed his life as commander-in-chief of the army of Poland. It was in Poland that in 1815 he fell in love with a sweet-natured Polish countess, Joanna Grudzińska. She seems to have made him gentler. If he divorced his estranged wife and married his Catholic mistress, it would further encourage Alexander to alter the succession.26

  The next in line was the much younger Nicholas, who looked like an emperor. When he was born, Catherine the Great hailed him as a ‘colossus’ with ‘a basso voice and hands almost as big as mine’ and he grew up into a gigantic, blue-eyed, fair-haired man, regularly described as ‘beautiful’. The younger brothers and sisters were brought up by their distant mother Maria, who left Nicholas feeling starved of love. Instead he found affection with his stalwart governesses, both the wives of Germanic officers, ‘la Générale’ Lieven (whom he called ‘Mutterkins’) and her junior, ‘la Colonelle’ Julia Adlerberg, but above all with his beloved Scottish nanny Jane Lyon. It was Lyon who taught Nicholas to hate Jews and Poles, whom she had come to loathe during the revolutionary tumult in Warsaw in 1794. As he got older, Nicholas was bullied by his governor General Gustav Lamsdorf whose ‘fear and coercion’, he wrote, ‘undermined my filial trust in my mother to whom we were rarely admitted alone’. Nicholas consoled himself in a secret society he formed with his favourite sister Annette and youngest brother Michael called the Triolathy in which they used codewords and wore special rings. ‘We rarely saw Emperor Alexander,’ recalled Nicholas, but ‘our guardian angel was especially affectionate to us’. On Alexander’s visits to his young brothers, the tsar drilled them with rifles – truly the sons of Paul.

  When N
icholas reached puberty, Lamsdorf had him shown the syphilis ward of a hospital as a warning against promiscuity, a vision that ‘so horrified me that I knew no woman until my marriage’. After 1812, Nicholas longed to serve, but he and Michael were not allowed to join the tsar until the fall of Paris, setting off with instructions from their mother who hoped the ‘military regime will not cause you to become crude, coarse and severe’.

  The brothers paraded through Paris with ‘mad joy’, but on his way back Nicholas passed through Berlin, where he met Princess Charlotte of Prussia, daughter of Frederick William and the late Louise. ‘There I saw’, he reminisced, ‘the one who, by my own choice, from first glance, excited in me a desire to give myself to her for life.’ The giant fell in love with this dainty but delicate flower, whom he always called ‘Mouffy’. Romance in a family of parodomaniacs meant their love letters were filled with regimental details, and Nicholas confided to Mouffy that the military was his ideal for society: ‘the Army is order . . . I regard all human life as nothing more than service.’ He got the tsar’s permission to pursue the match. In Paris after Waterloo, Alexander was already considering Nicholas for the throne. Baroness Krüdener hailed the teenaged grand duke: ‘Monseigneur, you will be emperor.’

  ‘Emperor?’ replied Nicholas. ‘A crown bought by the loss of brother Constantine would be a crown of thorns.’

  In October 1816, Nicholas and Mouffy were engaged: as she converted to Orthodoxy, and was taught Russian by the poet Zhukovsky, Nicholas trained for the throne. First, he was sent on a European tour. In London, hosted by Wellington and the prince regent, he was ogled by British ladies who exclaimed: ‘Devilish handsome! The handsomest man in Europe.’ But he was unimpressed by Parliament: ‘I have never thought any system could be better than that by which kings were delegated by providence to govern the masses.’ Then followed a Russian tour on which he recorded his anti-semitic and anti-Polish sentiments in his diary.