The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  On 1 July 1817, Nicholas and Mouffy were married. ‘A huge number of jewels were hung on me,’ recalled the frail Mouffy, who formally became Alexandra Fyodorovna, ‘so heavy I thought I’d die.’ ‘I felt very happy when our hands were joined,’ she wrote. ‘I placed my life in the keeping of my Nicholas and he has never betrayed that trust.’

  Yet Nicholas, now commander of the Izmailovsky Guards, was a pompous stickler for rules, hated for his humourless severity. He worshipped Alexander as ‘The Angel,’ but was less cosmopolitan and genial than him, more of a Russian disciplinarian. ‘Order had collapsed after the return from France,’ he recalled. ‘Officers wore tailcoats and even went on exercises in evening dress! Service was just a word, and no rules,’ he added. ‘I had a fiery zeal which turned superiors and subordinates against me.’ Mouffy charmed everyone. ‘I was very weak, very pale and (they claimed) very interesting-looking,’ she reflected later. ‘A few faces welcomed me with kind looks among them [Alexei] Orlov and Benckendorff,’ two of the most lady-killing bravoes. ‘It’s true my Nicholas’s appearance was too serious for his twenty-one years,’ she admitted, but in private ‘he was very tender and loving’. Yet ‘absolutely no one liked him’, noted the memoirist Vigel – except the ladies. At a masquerade, a masked lady propositioned him: ‘Do you know you’re the most beautiful man in Russia?’

  ‘My good madame,’ he replied sanctimoniously, ‘that is a matter that concerns my wife alone.’

  In 1818, Mouffy, pregnant for the first time, travelled to Moscow. ‘I heard the first cry of my first child,’ she wrote. ‘Nikki kissed me and burst into tears and thanked God.’

  ‘It’s a boy,’ announced Maria, who presided over the accouchement.

  ‘Our happiness redoubled,’ recalled Mouffy, ‘and yet I remember feeling something grave and melancholy in the thought that this creature would one day be emperor.’ The ‘delightful child, white, plump with big deep blue eyes’ would be Alexander II. Then in January 1819, their sister Catiche, queen of Württemberg, just thirty years old, died of erysipelas. The loss shook Alexander. At a dinner with Nicholas and Mouffy that summer, the tsar, whom they idolized with ‘an adoration going as far as exaltation’, suddenly declared that he was delighted by their marital bliss, which he himself so lacked, adding that the birth of a son was ‘a sign of God’s grace’. To Mouffy’s shocked surprise, he went on to say that ‘he was doubly pleased to see Nicholas fulfil his duties well, since one day a great weight would rest on him, that he regarded him as his replacement – and much earlier than presumed since it would happen while he was still alive.’

  ‘We were seated like two statues,’ she remembered. ‘Eyes wide!’

  ‘We were struck like a thunderbolt,’ declared Nicholas, who felt ‘an abyss opening up beneath his feet into which an irresistible force throws him’.

  ‘You seem surprised,’ said the tsar, explaining that Constantine was determined to renounce the throne. ‘For myself, I am decided to leave my functions and retire from the world.’ Nicholas and Mouffy wept.

  Constantine set the ball in motion by asking Alexander for a divorce so that he could marry his Polish love. That September, Alexander, accompanied by Nicholas, visited Constantine and agreed. In the summer of 1820, Constantine married his new wife. Now Alexander told his brothers, ‘I want to abdicate.’

  ‘Never had the shadow of such an idea come into our heads!’ claimed Mouffy. Both protested too much since they knew this was likely. Empress Elizabeth noticed Nicholas’s ambition: ‘Nicholas has only one idea in his head – to reign.’

  In early 1821, Constantine wrote to Alexander renouncing the throne. On 16 August 1823, Alexander signed a manifesto appointing ‘our second brother Nicholas’ as successor.* ‘The emperor hinted about it to us,’ wrote Nicholas, ‘but did not expand any more and we made every effort to avoid [the subject].’ Unwisely, and fatally, this was never made public.27

  In February 1822, Prince Alexander Ypsilantis, a Greek ex-adjutant of the tsar, led a ragtag detachment of adventurers into Ottoman Moldavia, hoping to spark an Orthodox rebellion against the sultan and force Russian intervention. The invasion was easily foiled and Ypsilantis was soon fleeing for his life, but it was embarrassing for Alexander, who had not sanctioned it. He was sure it had been ordered by the diabolical revolutionary Comité Central of Paris to divert the allies, ‘preventing us from destroying other synagogues of Satan’. But Greeks across Ottoman territories rebelled, Mahmud II hanged the patriarch of Constantinople and the cause mobilized Russians on behalf of their brethren.

  Alexander’s co-foreign minister, Capo d’Istria, believed that Russia should back the Greeks, but Metternich, fearing Russian influence in the East and revolutionary liberalism in the West, urged Alexander to treat them as ‘a criminal enterprise’. It was a ‘trap’, grumbled the tsar, who finally sacked Capo d’Istria and backed Metternich. ‘The Russian cabinet has ruined in one blow the great achievement of Peter the Great and all his successors,’ crowed Metternich.*

  The ‘huge burden’ of reigning† was wearing down Alexander. ‘He imagined seeing things that nobody would have thought of doing: that people were making fun of him, comically imitating him, making signs,’ wrote Mouffy. His increasing deafness isolated him more and he turned on Mouffy, his ‘remarks and reproaches’ making her cry – though he soon returned to his affectionate ways.

  The all-powerful Vampire, Arakcheev, exploited Alexander’s long absences and weary paranoia to destroy the emperor’s two closest retainers. As he departed for Verona, the tsar ordered the dissolution of ‘secret societies of all denominations’, but while he was away Arakcheev used this to attack Golitsyn, unleashing an Orthodox firebrand, Archimandrite Photius, to accuse him of revolutionary apostasy and reveal ‘the plan of revolution’. The emperor sacked his friend as education minister. He also sacked Volkonsky as chief of staff and replaced him with Baron Hans-Karl Dibich, a German who had long served in Russia. ‘God only knows’, said Volkonsky, but ‘the one thing I regret is that one day the emperor will surely learn the infamies of the villain [Arakcheev] who has caused the fall of many honest men’.

  On 6 June 1824, Alexander’s beloved daughter Sophia Naryshkina died just before her wedding. He heard the news during the morning parade. He paled and said, ‘I receive punishment for all the errors of my ways,’ and continued with the parade.

  ‘God has miraculously torn you from sin,’ agreed Golitsyn unforgivingly. ‘He takes back to Himself the fruit of this tie which should not have seen the light of day.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Alexander wrote to Arakcheev. ‘It’s God who wished it and I know how to submit myself. I support my pain with resignation and I pray God will fortify my soul.’ He travelled to Arakcheev’s estate Gruzino to grieve.

  On 7 November, the Neva flooded, submerging entire neighbourhoods, killing many, as the emperor, back in the Winter Palace, organized the relief effort. Then Elizabeth fell seriously ill. These blows brought him closer to his wronged wife, to whom he proposed a long stay in the south, for his rest and her health. Relations with the Ottomans were tense and he also needed to inspect the armies – and purge them of revolutionaries. ‘I know I am surrounded by assassins,’ he mused. Just before he left, he received a young captain from the Second Army in Ukraine named John Sherwood, born in Kent, who warned him, via Dr Wylie, that conspirators planned a coup.

  At this darkening moment, on 1 September 1825, Alexander, followed by Elizabeth, embarked on the honeymoon they had never had.

  On 23 September, the emperor arrived first in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, accompanied only by Dr Wylie, Volkonsky (who had rejoined his entourage) and Chief of Staff Dibich. Alexander oversaw the decoration of a small one-storey villa. Ten days later, Elizabeth arrived. When she asked him when he planned to return to Petersburg ‘so I could prepare myself for his departure, he answered, ‘As late as possible . . . not before the new year.’ That put me in a good mood all day.’

&n
bsp; After a month, Count Michael Vorontsov, newly appointed governor-general of New Russia, invited the tsar to inspect Crimea. Alexander agreed, but first he received the confirmation that there was indeed a conspiracy against him. Then he heard of the tragedy that had befallen Arakcheev.28

  The Vampire’s common-law wife with the black eyes and grenadier’s figure, Anastasia Minkina, had long terrorized the Gruzino peasants to enforce the discipline that so impressed the tsar. On 6 September Minkina had her maid thrashed and locked up two other girls in her jail. The next day, the beaten maid and her brother crept into Minkina’s bedroom and cut her throat so savagely she was almost beheaded.

  Arakcheev abandoned the government and galloped for Gruzino, where he threw himself on the ground crying out to whoever would listen: ‘You have killed her. Kill me too. Kill me quickly!’ Many of the serfs were arrested and tortured.

  ‘The throbbing of my heart, a daily fever, three weeks without a night’s rest, grief and depression have all made me so weak, I’ve lost my memory,’ he told the emperor. ‘You wouldn’t recognize your faithful servant.’

  ‘You say you don’t know where to go,’ Alexander replied, seeking to comfort Arakcheev. ‘Come to me. You don’t possess a friend whose affection is more sincere.’ But he also urged him to return to his duties. Twenty-five of Arakcheev’s servants were knouted; many died.29

  While Arakcheev’s serfs were being tortured, Sherwood, who had been ordered by Alexander to investigate, exposed both secret societies. The more radical Southern Society, strengthened by alliances with other groups, the Polish Secret Patriotic Society and the United Slavs, planned to assassinate Alexander while he stayed at the palace of Sashenka Branitska, Potemkin’s niece. Great names were implicated. Sherwood was meant to hand over this evidence at a meeting with Arakcheev, who, neglecting the emperor’s safety ‘because of a drunken, fat, pockmarked and loose woman’, as Sherwood put it, never turned up. But the reports finally reached Alexander in Taganrog.

  Alexander now had no choice but to act. As he ordered the arrest of the southern conspirators, he left Taganrog to ride happily along the Crimean shoreline, telling Volkonsky, ‘I’m going to move to Crimea . . . to live like a simple mortal. I’ve served twenty-five years and soldiers are given leave after this time . . . And you too will resign and be my librarian.’

  On 27 October, the tsar caught a chill then a fever. On 4 November, he fell seriously ill, though he made it back to Taganrog where Elizabeth and his doctors nursed him. Wylie offered medicines, but Alexander refused, supposedly telling his suite, ‘Why should I be cautious? I have two saints praying for me, Queen Louise of Prussia and my dear sister,’ Catiche. If that story is true, those two queens were the loves of his life. For several days he improved but then the fever got worse. Dr Wylie started to worry.

  On 14 November Alexander felt better, but when he got up to shave, he fainted. Prompted by Volkonsky, Elizabeth begged the emperor to take the Last Sacraments.

  ‘In what condition am I really?’ he asked Wylie. ‘Am I near my end?’

  ‘Yes, Sire,’ replied the Scot. ‘Your Imperial Majesty has rejected my prescriptions. I speak not as a physician but an honest man. It’s my duty as a Christian to tell you – there is no time to lose.’ Alexander took communion, drifting in and out of consciousness. Dibich wrote to the dowager empress in Petersburg and to Constantine, the apparent heir in Warsaw; the family prayed. Early on the 17th, Alexander rallied. ‘Today there’s a very decided amendment in the state of the emperor,’ Elizabeth wrote to Maria. ‘Even Sir James Wylie considers the case more satisfactory.’ But that night, the tsar became comatose and Wylie knew he was dying, probably of typhoid. At 10.50 a.m. on 19 November, Alexander, forty-seven years old, died. ‘Our Angel is in Heaven,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘and I sadly am on earth.’ The empress reflected on their lives as ‘friends since childhood. Together we traversed all the stages of life. Often distant we always found each other again. Finally on the true path, we only tasted the sweetness of our union. It was at this moment he was taken away from me.’ Attended by his tiny entourage, this seaside death in a bijou villa in a small town lacked the traditional drama of imperial deathbeds – but the very absence of official witnesses made this one of the great Romanov mysteries: had Alexander really died or had the mystic tsar falsified his own death?*

  The body was embalmed by the doctors, but they lacked the facilities of Petersburg, and the job was botched. Soon, the stench was eyewatering, the face unrecognizably blackened.30

  In the perilous confusion of the next few days, the empire would in theory have two emperors – and yet, in practice, none.

  * Three of the new ministries – interior, justice and finance – were the result of the break-up of the old office of procurator-general. Alexander’s friend Kochubey (raised to count, then exiled by Paul) became his long-serving interior minister with Stroganov as his deputy. The Anglophile veteran Count Alexander Vorontsov, who had served Catherine the Great, became foreign minister with Czartoryski as his deputy. Novosiltsev was deputy justice minister. In August, Laharpe arrived too, hoping to promote his liberal agenda.

  * The Russian possession of the Ionian Islands, taken from the French in 1789, allowed Alexander, advised by a Corfiote nobleman Ioannis Capo d’Istria, to experiment with the liberal constitution of his so-called Septinsular Republic which he favoured for everywhere – except Russia itself. Within Russia, the enduring achievements of his liberal experiment were in education where he created a new Ministry of Public Instruction under the ancient Zavadovsky (Catherine the Great’s lover of 1774–6), reorganized Moscow University, opened new universities in Vilnius, Tartu, Kharkov, Kazan and later Petersburg and lycées for the civil service, most famously the Tsarskoe Selo school where Pushkin was one of the first pupils.

  † After failing to rescue Paul, Arakcheev had retired to his estate at Gruzino, where he erected a memorial portrait of the late tsar with the legend in gold: ‘My heart is pure and my spirit without reproach vis-à-vis You.’ Arakcheev’s dogged loyalty to Paul and his harsh militarism and personal devotion to Alexander (his motto was ‘Devoted without Flattery’) explain his rise to power as much as do his discipline and efficiency.

  * Now formally promoted to foreign minister, Czartoryski was widely distrusted at court, but he himself appreciated his increasingly contradictory role as a Polish patriot serving the Russian tsar, as a liberal serving an autocrat: ‘I had no inclination to serve Russia’ but ‘I was there merely by accident like an exotic plant in a foreign land.’

  * Alexander appointed the Francophile Count Nikolai Rumiantsev as foreign minister and later chancellor. Rumiantsev, fifty-four years old, had argued against an British alliance and for a French alliance back in 1804. The son of Catherine the Great’s marshal (and possibly grandson of Peter the Great), he was a polymathic book-collector and naturalist (orchids and butterflies are named after him) who had sponsored the first Russian world circumnavigation, so that Bodega Bay in California was originally Rumiantsev Bay.

  * Catiche was no longer available, having married one of those stupid but sweet princes she preferred: Prince George of Oldenburg. She had previously been in love with the married Prince Peter Bagration, a Russified Georgian and impetuous general who had been Suvorov’s protégé. Bagration was married to Katya, the daughter of Katinka Scavronskaya, now Countess Litta. During Paul’s reign, Bagration had fallen in love with Katya, but she was in love with Peter von der Pahlen. When Paul heard about Bagration’s infatuation, he insisted on sponsoring the marriage. ‘Bagration married the young [great] niece of the great Prince Potemkin,’ reported Langeron. ‘This rich and lustrous partner did not suit him. Bagration was a mere soldier, with the tone and manners of one, and he was extremely ugly. His wife was as white as he was black, and she would not be happy with such a husband for long . . .’ Soon Bagration was in love with Grand Duchess Catiche – and Princess Bagration would be one of the most notorious women in Europe.

>   * Since the Vasa dynasty had no heirs, the Swedes chose a French revolutionary general, Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, prince de Pontecorvo, as their crown prince: he became King Charles XIV. He ruled Sweden until 1844 and his dynasty still rules Sweden today.

  † At the Paris embassy, Alexander’s factotum Karl von Nesselrode processed Talleyrand’s gossipy but expensive reports in which the tsar was codenamed ‘Louise’ and Talleyrand himself was ‘Handsome Leander’. Nesselrode was joined by Alexander’s aide-de-camp Alexander Chernyshev, twenty-seven-year-old nephew of Catherine the Great’s lover Lanskoy; Chernyshev ran a mole in Napoleon’s War Ministry. He also gathered intelligence by dazzling Parisian salons and penetrating the boudoirs of the well-informed Parisiennes who ‘looked at each other like wild cats when the Northern Lovelace appeared’, excited by ‘his attire, that waspish way of being enclosed in his suit, his hat with its plume, hair thrown in big tufts, that Tatar face, his almost perpendicular eyes . . .’ according to Laure Junot, duchesse d’Abrantès, probably one of his conquests.

  * Emmanuel Naryshkin was distinguished only by his longevity: amazingly he served as a court chamberlain at the court of the last tsar, dying only in 1900. His mother Maria Naryshkina also lived a long life, remarrying after her husband’s death and dying in 1854.

  * Bessarabia, the part of Moldavia between the Dnieper and Pruth rivers, was not his only southern conquest: after Paul’s death, Alexander had formally annexed the main kingdom of Georgia, Kartli-Kakhetia. When Alexander’s governor General Lazarev arrested the Dowager Queen Mariam, she stabbed him to death. She was brought to Petersburg, and it was feared she might assassinate Alexander. But, treated well, the murderous queen of Georgia became an exotic ornament of the Russian court, where she attended all the coronations and lived until 1850. In 1803, the Dadiani princes of Mingrelia on the Black Sea coast were taken under Russian protection. In 1809, King Solomon II of Imeretia, now allied to the Ottomans, fought Russian troops until in 1810, with Solomon surrounded, Alexander deposed him and annexed the kingdom. The Russians needed a port to link the Caucasus with Odessa: the best port was Soukhoumi, ruled by the princes of Abkhazia. These princes often changed their religion and names as power swung between the Ottomans and Russians, depending on who was winning. Now the prince of Abkhazia, Sefer Bey, converted to Orthodoxy and, as a Russian ally, changed his name to Prince Giorgi Shervashidze. He gave Russia access to Soukhoumi.