The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  * At this supreme moment, Catiche needed his help. Her ex-lover ‘Bagration died yesterday: I told you he holds documents that might cruelly compromise me if they fell into strange hands.’ These were her love letters of course. Alexander reported back that he had got the papers.

  * On 15 December 1812, Catiche lost her beloved husband George of Oldenburg, aged only twenty-four.

  * The fortunes of war delayed some lovers, facilitated others. ‘It was in the midst of great strategic movements, princess, that I received your delightful letter,’ wrote Alexander to Zinaida from Leipzig, apologizing that her latest love letter had been lost for two days during the excitement of battle in the pockets of Peter Volkonsky’s ‘innumerable wardrobe before I could have it, making the excuse he’d left it in a third coat, though he was already wearing two’. During a rare romantic moment on the field of Leipzig heaped with bodies, Prince Peter Volkonsky found a nineteen-year-old French girl weeping for her fallen French husband. Though his wife was near by in Alexander’s retinue, Volkonsky picked her up and made her his mistress. No wonder he forgot that he was carrying the emperor’s love letters in his pocket! Later he took his mistress to the Congress of Vienna, where she visited him nightly in the Hofburg Palace dressed as a boy.

  * The brothers Mikhail and Alexei Orlov, both Guards officers and adjutants to the tsar, were the illegitimate sons of Count Fyodor Orlov, brother of Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory.

  * The Lievens were at the heart of the Baltic German cousinhood. Christoph’s mother was the redoubtable Countess Charlotte Lieven, mistress of the robes, governess of Emperor Paul’s younger children. His wife Dorothea was a Benckendorff, daughter of Empress Maria’s late best friend. As a girl she had a romance with Grand Duke Constantine and Empress Maria had considered marrying Dorothea to Arakcheev, so she was lucky to marry Lieven. Sharp-faced, incisive and self-obsessed, Countess Lieven became a one-woman diplomatic-amorous whirlwind whose lovers included Metternich of Austria, Earl Grey of Britain and François Guizot of France, living proof of Henry Kissinger’s dictum: ‘power is the greatest aphradisiac’.

  * In Paris, Alexander offered Arakcheev his marshal’s baton. Arakcheev had been crucial in managing the war, though he had played no role in strategy – but he refused. However when the tsar sent him home to run Petersburg, the Vampire sulked. Alexander pacified him with a revealing tribute: ‘It’s with true chagrin that I am separated from you. Receive again the expression of my recognition of your numerous services which will always be engraved in my heart. I am susceptible to boredom and affliction. After fourteen years of hard government, ruinous war and two dangerous years, I see myself deprived of the man in whom I always have unlimited confidence. There’s no one in whom I’ve had the same confidence . . . Your devoted friend for life, Alexander.’

  † He sacked Chancellor Rumiantsev, State Secretary Shishkov and Moscow Governor-General Rostopchin. Arakcheev became rapporteur of the Committee of Ministers and director of Alexander’s chancellery, which he ran from his own house – his rule known as Arakcheevschina – the time of Arakcheev. As for the foreign ministers, Karl von Nesselrode had a German father and a Jewish mother but was raised as an Anglican at the British embassy in Lisbon. Dreary, colourless, submissive, he looked like a small-town clerk. ‘I’m called when I’m needed,’ he boasted to his wife. ‘I am completely passive.’ His rival Ioannis Capo d’Istria, now thirty-one, was a fascinating meteor, a liberal reformer, born in Corfu, trained as a doctor, promoted by Alexander to chief minister of the Septinsular Republic of the Ionian Islands. As the tsar’s foreign minister he was the champion of progressive causes – or, as Metternich saw it, ‘a complete and thorough fool, a perfect miracle of wrong-headedness’.

  * Her youngest sister, Dorothea, aged twenty, was on the other side – as partner of Talleyrand. Their mother, the duchess of Courland, had once been his mistress. Dorothea was first engaged to Czartoryski until, at Erfurt, Talleyrand had asked Alexander to marry her to Talleyrand’s ne’er-do-well nephew, by whom she dutifully had two sons. Talleyrand arranged for his duchy of Dino to be ceded to his nephew so that she could be duchesse de Dino. Thirty-nine years younger than the cadaverous prince, Dorothea became his last mistress – though he had to share her with a young Austrian, Count Karl Clam-Martinitz. In 1820, Dorothea gave birth to a daughter whom Talleyrand treated as his own.

  * Alexander had travelled via Czartoryski’s estate to show the Poles that ‘revenge is not in my nature’ – and Czartoryski joined his delegation, which included the German Nesselrode, the Greek Capo d’Istria and the Corsican Pozzo di Borgo, with only one Russian, his ambassador to Vienna, Count Andrei Razumovsky (who in Catherine the Great’s reign had had an affair with Paul’s first wife), his wife Elizabeth, his brother Constantine and his sister Catiche formed the Romanov contingent. His ex-mistresses Maria Naryshkina and Zinaida Volkonskaya were there too, much to his irritation. He sent Naryshkina home and cut Volkonskaya.

  * Constantine lived up to his reputation as the Angry Hyena: when Wilhelmina de Sagan’s lover Windischgrätz challenged him to a duel, he struck him with a riding crop. Vienna was relieved when Alexander sent him off to command his Polish army.

  * The septuagenarian prince de Ligne, friend of Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette, died in the last days of the Congress. As for Princess Bagration, out of favour and with debts of 300,000 francs, she was placed under house arrest until she fled Vienna, following Alexander to beg him to pay off her creditors. She set up a salon in Paris attended by Stendhal and Balzac, finally marrying a British diplomat, Lord Howden. Wilhelmina de Sagan moved on to become the mistress of Lord Stewart, Castlereagh’s brother, before marrying a third husband, Count Karl Schulenberg. She never got her daughter back from Russia but remained friends with Metternich and died in 1839.

  * Louis XVIII returned to power and dismissed Talleyrand, letting Alexander propose the new prime minister: Armand du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, governor-general of New Russia and the Crimea for over ten years – and the real creator of Odessa. Talleyrand mocked the appointment of ‘the Frenchman who best knows Crimea’. In New Russia, Alexander replaced Richelieu with another worldly Frenchman, Langeron, who continued to foster the cosmopolitan rise of Odessa.

  * On 27 August 1818 Alexander set off for Aix-la-Chappelle, the first of the post-Waterloo congresses, to meet Emperor Francis and King Frederick William III, as well as Metternich, Richelieu, Castlereagh and Wellington. Here Countess Lieven took up again with Constantine and then embarked on a great affair with Metternich, complicating the tsar’s diplomacy. Alexander was keen to promote his Holy Alliance to guarantee conservative stability across Europe and help Spain recover its rebellious colonies in South America, even suggesting to the Spanish that, in return for old Russian warships to crush the South Americans, Russia would receive Minorca as a naval base, an echo of a similar idea of Catherine and Potemkin. At Aix, Metternich and Castlereagh vetoed this idea, but the powers agreed to end their occupation of France. The others feared the size of the Russian army, but Alexander insisted: ‘I consider my Army as the Army of Europe.’

  * He did at least correct an injustice from seven years earlier. On 30 August 1817, Alexander rehabilitated Speransky, appointing him governor of Penza, issuing a decree that admitted the dubious case against his former ‘right hand’. Soon afterwards, in a letter totally absolving Speransky, he promoted him to governor-general of Siberia.

  * Pushkin’s verse on Arakcheev was devastating: ‘Oppressor of all Russia / Persecutor of governors / And tutor to the Council / To the tsar he is friend and brother / Full of malice and vengeance / Without wit, without feeling, without honour / Who is he? Loyal without flattery / The penny soldier of a whore.’ Here is his more good-natured verse on the war-hero Alexei Orlov, his mistress and his small penis: ‘Orlov in bed with Istomina / Lay in squalid nudity / In the heated affair the inconstant general / Had not distinguished himself. / Not intending to insult h
er dear one / Lais took a microscope / And says: “Let me see, my sweet, what you fucked me with.”’

  * Their youngest brother Michael, a jovial soldier and practical joker but an oafish husband, married Elena Pavlovna (the former Princess Charlotte of Württemberg) in February 1824.

  * In October 1822, Alexander travelled to a congress in Verona where he proposed sending 150,000 Russian troops to the West to eliminate any revolutions, starting with that in Spain. Britain, represented by Wellington (as Castlereagh had just commited suicide) disapproved and instead France invaded Spain. Alexander spent the congress pursuing Lady Londonderry while Wellington (according to the French foreign minister) looked for sex on the streets of Verona. As for Capo d’Istria, he became the first head of state of independent Greece but was assassinated in 1831.

  † He revealed his mentality to his ex-mistress Zinaida Volkonskaya, thanking her for treating ‘me with such kindness when you could well have thought me ungrateful and insensitive when I am neither’. It was the ‘huge burden which weighs on me which makes me seem so’. He looked forward to seeing her to ‘express in person how touched I am by the friendly way you treat me in spite of my sins’. Zinaida later held a salon in her Moscow mansion which is now Yelisev’s Foodstore, attended by Pushkin, but her liberal sympathies later displeased Tsar Nicholas I and she moved to Italy where she lived in the Villa Volkonsky, today’s British embassy.

  * The distance from Petersburg, the putrefaction that made the body unrecognizable, and inconsistencies in the reports of Elizabeth and the doctors, all helped spawn the legend that Alexander was still alive. Had he become a travelling hermit? In 1836, police in Perm, in the Urals, arrested a holy elder – a starets – named Fyodor Kuzmich, aged sixtyish, blueeyed, deaf in one ear and fluent in French with knowledge of the Russian court. After a whipping and exile for refusing to reveal his past, he wandered as a hermit, teaching scripture and history until he retired to Tomsk. By the time he died in 1864, many believed him to be Alexander. It is said that Alexander III ordered Alexander I’s tomb to be opened and found it empty. This is a myth that plays into three traditions: the sacred tsar who escapes the wicked nobles to do good works and wander as a holy man, itself connected to chiliastic Byzantine legends of the Final Emperor who appears in Jerusalem at the End of Days (Alexander the hermit is said to have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem); the tradition of dead tsars who reappeared as pretenders; and the ideal of the starets, that type made most famous by Rasputin.

  SCENE 1

  Jupiter

  CAST

  Maria Fyodorovna, dowager empress, widow of Paul I

  NICHOLAS I, emperor 1825–55, son of Paul I and Maria

  Alexandra Fyodorovna (née Princess Charlotte of Prussia), empress, Nicholas’s wife, ‘Mouffy’

  ALEXANDER II, emperor 1855–81, their eldest son, caesarevich, married Princess Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt

  Maria, their eldest daughter, married Max de Beauharnais, duke of Leuchtenberg

  Olga, their second daughter, ‘Ollie’, married Karl I, king of Württemberg

  Alexandra, their third daughter, ‘Adini’, married Prince Frederick of Hesse-Kassel

  Konstantin, their second son, ‘Kostia’, ‘Aesop’, married Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Altenburg, ‘Sanny’

  Nikolai Nikolaievich, their third son, married Princess Alexandra of Oldenburg

  Mikhail, their fourth son, married Olga, née Princess Cecilie of Baden

  CONSTANTINE I, emperor, 1825, second son of Paul I and Maria, elder brother of Nicholas I, caesarevich, briefly emperor, married Princess Lowicza

  Anna, ‘Annette’, sixth daughter of Paul and Maria, married King William II of the Netherlands

  Michael, youngest son of Paul and Maria, married Elena Pavlovna (née Princess Charlotte of Württemberg), ‘Family Intellectual’

  COURTIERS, ministers etc.

  Mikhail Miloradovich, count, general, governor-general of Petersburg, ‘Bayard’

  Alexander Benckendorff, count, chief of the Third Section

  Prince Peter Volkonsky, court minister

  Vladimir Adlerberg, court minister, count

  Ivan Paskevich, general, count of Yerevan, prince of Warsaw, field marshal

  Karl von Nesselrode, foreign minister, chancellor, count

  Alexander Chernyshev, war minister, count, prince, ‘Northern Lovelace’

  Hans-Karl Dibich, German general, count, chief of staff, ‘Samovar’

  Alexei Orlov, soldier-diplomat, chief of the Third Section, count, prince Prince

  Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, war minister, chief of the Third Section

  Count Michael Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia and Caucasus, prince, ‘Milord’

  Prince Alexander Menshikov, chief of admiralty, governor of Finland, commander in Crimea

  Varvara Nelidova, Nicholas’s mistress, ‘Varenka’

  Vasily Zhukovsky, poet, tutor to Mouff y, then to Alexander II

  Alexander Pushkin, poet

  As Dibich sent news of the tsar’s death to both Petersburg and Warsaw and made the arrangements for the body to return to the capital, Alexander’s widow and all the courtiers swore allegiance to Emperor Constantine I – but the chief of staff also accelerated the investigation into the conspiracies.

  The couriers took six days to reach Warsaw but eight days to gallop the 1,400 miles to Petersburg. In Warsaw, on 25 November 1825, Constantine’s entourage did not know that he had renounced the throne. Naturally they all wanted to take the oath, but Constantine made frenzied efforts to prevent their submissions. When Novosiltsev, Alexander’s Polish representative, fell to his knees and hailed ‘Your Imperial Majesty’, Constantine revealed that he had renounced the throne. The confused Novosiltsev tried again, prompting the caesarevich to bellow, ‘Desist and remember our one and only emperor is Nicholas!’ Moments later, his adjutant fell to his knees, at which Constantine went berserk, shaking him by his lapels: ‘Silence! How can you dare speak such words? Do you realize you can be put in chains and sent to Siberia?’

  On 27 November, Nicholas and his mother Maria were celebrating Alexander’s recovery in the Winter Palace chapel when the dowager empress’s valet brought Dibich’s letter. ‘I saw that all was lost. Our Angel was no longer on the earth.’ Their mother collapsed. Nicholas prayed before the altar and, upon leaving his mother in his wife’s hands, declared, ‘I will go to do my duty.’ But what was his duty?

  Nicholas immediately took the oath of allegiance to Emperor Constantine and made sure everyone else did too. When he returned to tend to his mother, she was horrified: ‘Nicholas, what have you done? Didn’t you know there is another manifesto naming you heir apparent?’

  ‘If there is such a manifesto,’ replied Nicholas, ‘it’s unknown to me . . . but we all know our master, our legitimate sovereign, is my brother Constantine, come what may!’ He wrote to inform Constantine that ‘I’ve sworn the oath to you. Could I forget my honour and conscience have placed our beloved motherland in such a difficult position . . . All is in order [but] hasten here for the love of God.’

  ‘My resolve is unshakeable,’ Constantine replied. ‘I can’t accept your invitation to come more quickly to you and I will go even further away if everything is not arranged in conformity with the will of our late emperor.’

  As the letters of the brothers crossed each other for over a week, Constantine insisted in Warsaw that he was not tsar, and Nicholas refused in Petersburg to accept that he was. Nicholas’s sense of chivalry and Romanov fraternity meant he could not grab the crown, which had to be freely given to him by his brother, but this the unhinged Constantine could not do.

  The only man in Petersburg who knew the secret of Alexander’s manifesto, the mystical Alexander Golitsyn, hastened to Prince Lopukhin, ageing president of the State Council (father of Paul’s mistress), urging him to summon the councillors.* Many insisted that Constantine was the heir, particularly the powerbroker during these strange days: General Mikhail Milo
radovich, governor-general of Petersburg, was best friends with Constantine whom he argued was the rightful tsar, whatever Alexander had decreed. Miloradovich, one of the heroes of Borodino, was an eccentric playboy, nicknamed ‘Bayard’, after the romantic French knight, for his womanizing in the city’s theatres which he treated as a personal harem. Now he continued seducing ballerinas and assured Nicholas: ‘Everything is quiet.’

  For Nicholas, there was only one solution: Constantine must come to the capital – or at least publicly renounce the throne. So on 3 December, Nicholas begged him to do either or both. ‘So passed eight or nine days,’ recalled Nicholas. ‘How could we explain our silence to society? Impatience and discontent were widespread.’

  ‘Count on my feelings if you become sovereign,’ wrote Annette, now in The Hague, married to William, prince of Orange, to her brother Constantine, reflecting, ‘It will perhaps be a unique example to see two brothers fighting over who will not have the throne.’ But Empress Maria was torn between sons. ‘Oh my children, what a dreadful position I’m in,’ she wrote to Annette, adding that her youngest son ‘Michael is leaving today to go to our dear Emperor Constantine . . . may he soon be here with us.’ Michael rushed back and forth with the letters, but even when the dowager empress beseeched him, Constantine refused to leave Warsaw, terrified that a progress towards Petersburg could become an unstoppable procession to power. The Angry Hyena explained this to Nicholas – yet without the required public renunciation.