The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Shamyl, bitter at losing his son, rebuilt his armies until, by 1844, Nicholas realized that his campaign had failed. So he turned to the most sophisticated of his grandees, Count Michael Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia and Crimea. Even though Vorontsov was sixty-two and afflicted with eye-trouble, Nicholas appointed him viceroy of the Caucasus with powers unknown since Potemkin.*

  Moving to Tiflis, Vorontsov meticulously planned his war, but the emperor ordered him to begin before he was ready. In June 1845, Vorontsov marched into Daghestan; Shamyl withdrew. ‘God has crowned you with success,’ Nicholas told Vorontsov, ‘and shown nothing can ever stop the Orthodox Russians when they go where their tsar bids them.’ But when the Russian forces reached Shamyl’s capital, Dargo, they found it abandoned and themselves surrounded. Vorontsov barely escaped, losing 4,000 men. The chastened tsar praised Milord and raised him to prince, letting him pursue his undramatic strategy of cutting off Shamyl’s supplies.

  Shamyl now found support in Britain. He wrote to Queen Victoria. The British lionized the plucky Islamic warriors, raised funds and sent rifles, while Nicholas was increasingly regarded as a dictator* who aspired to swallow the Ottoman empire – and threaten British India. Nicholas decided that only his own charm could conquer the British.15

  On 21 June 1844 a traveller named ‘Count Orlov’ disembarked at Woolwich on a Dutch steamer. When he arrived at the Russian embassy in London (turning down an invitation to stay at Buckingham Palace) it was already after midnight, but the mysterious count wrote to Prince Albert, the Coburg who had recently married Queen Victoria, asking to meet her immediately. Albert was not impressed with such autocratic caprice: Nicholas, he told Victoria, ‘is a man inclined too much to impulse and feeling which makes him act wrongly often’.

  The very pregnant Victoria received Nicholas the next morning and invited him to Windsor. Arriving by train on 23 June, he refused the decadent comforts of a soft democratic bed and insisted on sleeping on the steel cot and straw-filled leather pallet that he had brought with him.

  ‘I highly prize England,’ he told Victoria and Albert, ‘but for what the French say about me, I care not at all! I spit on it!’ The British were disturbed by this giant dogmatic Jupiter who told Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, ‘I am taken for an actor but I’m not. I am thoroughly straightforward.’ Perhaps too straightforward. Peel asked him to talk more quietly as everyone could hear his booming pronouncements. ‘Turkey is a dying man,’ he thundered. ‘He will, he must die! A critical moment. I shall have to put my armies in motion; Austria must do the same . . . and the English and her maritime forces. Thus a Russian army, an Austrian army, a great English fleet will all be congregated.’ Now he came to the point of his trip – an understanding with Britain to plan for Ottoman disintegration without a war yet with the flexibility to express Russia’s messianic mission to influence Constantinople and to have access through the Straits, a strategic necessity: ‘So many powderkegs close to the fire, how to prevent sparks from catching? I don’t claim one inch of Turkish soil but neither will I allow any other to have an inch of it.’ So he proposed maintaining the status quo – and a ‘straightforward understanding’ in case the Ottomans collapsed.

  The louder he talked, the less the British believed him and the more anxious they became about his aggressive designs. After nine days, the prince consort travelled to Woolwich to see off the emperor. Victoria was not impressed by him. ‘He seldom smiles and when he does, the expression is not a happy one,’ wrote Victoria in an astute judgement. Her visitor was ‘stern and severe . . . his mind is an uncivilized one . . . Politics and military are the only things he takes an interest in.’ His autocracy was even worse, she thought, because ‘he is sincere, even in his most dogmatic acts’, convinced ‘that’s the only way to govern. Very clever I don’t think him.’16

  She was right. Behind the bombast, he was jittery – and the risks of European revolution increased throughout his reign. Russia desperately needed reform, but the more it needed modernization in a changing Europe, the higher the risks in a revolutionary age. Nicholas sought comfort in his army as the perfect expression of his love of order where ‘no one commands before he himself has learned to obey . . . everything is subordinated to one goal, everything has its purpose’. He was always the officer of 1815: that glory was the apogee of the Russian experience, expressed for him through the military uniforms that he meticulously designed, down to the buttons and the colour of moustaches (dyed black, he insisted, whatever the officer’s hair colour), and the balletic perfection of his endless parades which reassured him that Russia was still at the height of its glory. In preserving this army as a museum of Napoleonic magnificence, he damned the very institution he most loved. But like the enlightened despots of the eighteenth century, great systemizers who avoided any reform that would impinge on their power, he respected Russia’s laws and ordered Speransky to codify them: forty-five volumes were published during the 1830s. He promoted education for his civil servants, founding a school of jurisprudence. He despised serfdom – ‘Serfdom is an evil obvious to all’ – and repeatedly returned to plans to reform or abolish it. He appointed his most gifted reformer, Count Paul Kiselev, to his Imperial Chancellery to clarify the status of the millions of crown peasants, declaring them ‘free inhabitants’ – yet they were not freed. Nicholas finally decided that reforming serfdom was dangerous: ‘to touch it now would be even more destructive’.

  Meanwhile he sought an ideology to counteract the rising fervours of liberalism and nationalism that threatened his world. The idea of the nation as a political-cultural expression had been propagated by the French Revolution, yet ironically it was the war of liberation against Napoleon that had really legitimized nationalism as the authentic spirit of a people. In Russia, where politics was banned, literature offered a new, often coded, language to express forbidden aspirations. The literary salons of Moscow became the battlefield of a debate on the nature of Russia itself between so-called ‘Westerners’ and ‘Slavophiles’. The Westerners were split between liberals and socialists. The liberals, of whom there were never many, wanted Russia to become a constitutional monarchy like say Britain. The socialists, espousing ideas that were just beginning to strike a chord in Russia, believed a class revolution must liberate the peasantry to achieve universal equality.

  The Slavophiles espoused a nationalist cult of Russia’s exceptional identity as a guide both to its role in the world and to the nature of its government at home, a vision they believed had been undermined by the Western reforms of Peter the Great. They idealized the ‘Russian World’ of peasantry, villages, rituals and Orthodoxy, while disdaining the flaccid, decadent West. But Nicholas did not recognize that these insolent scribblers had any right to discuss matters best left to their tsar.

  While he was horrified by such emotional populism anywhere in Europe and believed in Russia as empire as much as nation, even he was cautiously influenced by the zeitgeist. Nationalism, under his imperial aegis and in the right context, could strengthen the foundations of the autocracy. His brilliant long-serving education minister, Uvarov, a conservative romantic, provided the intellectual framework to defend sacred autocracy and Russian exceptionalism. ‘Our duty’, declared Uvarov in 1833, ‘is to see that, in accordance with the supreme intention of our August Monarch, the education of the people is carried out in the united spirit of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality.’ In Nicholas’s mind, only he would decide what Russian nationhood meant, in parallel with his conception of a multi-ethnic empire, but there were flaws in this. After all, this was a tsar who was by birth almost totally Germanic and had promoted more Baltic Germans to high positions than anyone since Empress Anna. When one of his officials, Yuri Samarin, proposed the russification of the Baltics, Nicholas imprisoned him briefly and reprimanded him: ‘What you really meant is that since Emperor Paul we have been surrounded by Germans and have ourselves been Germanized.’ Yet his own policy promoted Orthodox Russians as the l
eading people of the empire and implicitly excluded Catholic Poles, Protestant Balts, Muslim Tatars and of course Jews, who were the first to suffer.17

  Nicholas had been taught to hate the Jews by his Scottish nanny Jane Lyon and as a youngster travelling through Russia described them as ‘absolute leeches, fastening themselves everywhere and completely exhausting these unfortunate provinces’. He admitted to the British ambassador that ‘I have no great feeling for the Jews.’ Now promoting his new ideology, he regarded his several million Jews as an insult to Orthodoxy and devised restrictions and taxes to break them. In 1827, he ordered conscription into the army of Jewish boys from the age of twelve for twenty-five years ‘to move them most effectively to change their religion’. Since 1804, Jews had technically had to live in the Pale, parts of Poland and Ukraine, but enforcement of this requirement was uneven. In 1835, Nicholas tightened and enforced the regulations, banning Jews from all major cities and limiting their freedoms in many ways, including their rights to own land. He planned to abolish Jewish communities, outlaw traditional dress and deploy a combination of education and harassment to persuade them to convert.

  Nicholas’s anti-semitism was ‘the most ludicrous policy since the pharaohs’, in Vorontsov’s opinion. ‘We are persecuting, hindering from living, a million citizens . . . a peaceful, submissive, industrious people, the only active people in our Polish provinces,’ though he added that personally ‘I find their customs repellent.’

  The British, already uneasy about Russia, were disgusted by this growing anti-semitism, which now became a European issue for the first time. In April 1846, Sir Moses Montefiore, then aged sixty-one, a wealthy baronet and brother-in-law of the banker N. M. Rothschild, arrived in Petersburg. His mission was backed by Prime Minister Peel.* At 1 p.m. on 28 May, the tsar himself received Montefiore, telling him that the guard outside the palace that day was composed of Jewish soldiers: ‘They were always brave – the Maccabees!’ But when Montefiore insisted that all Russian Jews were loyal and industrious, Nicholas patronizingly replied: ‘If they were like you.’ Montefiore later admitted that the tsar’s remarks ‘against the Jews made every hair on my head stand on end’. As for Nicholas, he thought the Englishman was ‘kind and honest yet a Jew and a lawyer – and for this it is forgivable for him to wish many things’. On his way home, Montefiore was mobbed by the Jews of Vilna, the Jerusalem of the North. The Third Section secret policemen reported the excitement of the ‘greedy Yids’ who flocked to ‘the English Messiah’. He achieved little, but he kept the white gloves he had worn that day for the rest of his life.18 Yet the real threat to Russia came not from home but from abroad.

  ‘We must be ready,’ Nicholas told his ‘father-commander’ Paskevich soon after returning from England. ‘No mercy with these people.’ While the tsar was anxiously watching Russia for signs of impending revolution, he suffered a series of blows in his personal life. His children were growing up and, as his daughters married, he celebrated and yet missed them.† He allowed his youngest and favourite, Adini – ‘the little moppet’ – to marry a Hessian prince, but she was already showing signs of TB. On 30 July 1844, Adini died aged nineteen and pregnant. ‘Our grief is lifelong,’ he told Annette. ‘An open wound we shall carry to the grave.’ He consoled himself that ‘this dear Angel was so excellent, so pure, her end so sublime and edifying she belonged more [in heaven] than on earth’.

  Then Benckendorff, whose later years were embarrassed by an obsessive love affair with one of the emperor’s discarded mistresses,* died. ‘I’ve been deprived of my trusty Benckendorff,’ he told Paskevich, ‘whose service and friendship of nineteen years I won’t forget or replace. This year has been a heavy one.’ So there was a new vulnerability in his letters to his daughter Olga as she wondered whether to marry Crown Prince Karl of Württemberg: ‘How will you with God’s help decide your fate? It’s totally up to you . . . Your heart, your feelings are the guarantee that your decision will be the best . . . That’s why I’m calm awaiting your decision. God be with you, my angel. Love your Papa as he loves you. Your old friend Papa.’ When Olga accepted the prince’s proposal,† he confessed that ‘the emptiness it leaves with us is quite painful’. Contemplating mortality after the death of Adini, the emperor planned a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  But there was good news from Alexander and Marie, who gave birth to an heir, Nikolai, always known in the family as ‘Nixa’: ‘a wonderful happiness for us’, wrote the tsar. Marie was to produce two daughters and six sons – a glut of heirs.19

  On 20 February 1848, at a court ball, Nicholas heard the shocking news that Paris had risen and that King Louis-Philippe had abdicated and fled. ‘We were all thunderstruck!’ wrote the twenty-year-old Kostia in his diary. ‘Only blood is visible on the horizon. Mama too is frightened.’ The ferment had started in Palermo but spread rapidly across Europe.

  A day later, Kostia heard that France was ‘a republic governed by a committee of journalists and a worker. This is what we’ve come to!’ he exclaimed, adding a few days later: ‘The young officers rejoice because there is hope of war!’

  ‘When Paris sneezes,’ said Metternich, ‘Europe catches cold.’ In Austria, Chancellor Metternich himself was overthrown, fleeing for his own safety, and Emperor Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his young nephew Franz Josef. Revolution infected Berlin, Frankfurt, Budapest – and Wallachia and Moldavia, technically Ottoman-ruled but Orthodox in religion.

  ‘This insolence threatens in its madness even Our Russia, entrusted to us by God,’ declared Nicholas. ‘But it will not succeed.’ In a panic of fear and outrage, he crushed the revolution in Wallachia and Moldavia, forcing the sultan to concede greater Russian control. In Paris and Vienna, the revolutions were suppressed but, right next to Poland, in Hungary, the revolutionaries declared independence. On 29 May, Franz Josef requested Russian intervention. Eight days later, Paskevich with forces totalling 350,000 invaded Hungary. But while another Russian army immediately defeated the Hungarians, Paskevich bungled his offensive, driving Nicholas to distraction: ‘I very much regret that [rebel general] Gorgei with his entire army escaped you! I will only understand when you personally explain it to me.’ On 18 July, the rebels surrendered. ‘Hungary lies at the feet of Your Imperial Majesty,’ wrote Paskevich, who was praised by the tsar: ‘Thou art the glory of my twenty-five-year reign.’

  Nicholas’s power had reached its peak,* but his hegemony was fragile. He was resented almost as much by his allies Austria and Prussia as by his enemies Britain and France. Worse, Russia itself was sclerotic. The emperor’s fatigue and rigidity had become potentially catastrophic problems. Nicholas had failed to realize that the world had changed. His Olympian isolation blinded him to what the country needed to compete with the West.†

  His swelling bureaucracy, staffed by thousands of clerks, awaiting automatic promotions – witheringly satirized by Gogol’s play The Inspector-General – vomited forth millions of documents that monarch and ministers could scarcely absorb, and further divided the tsar and Petersburg from the country. His army was antiquated, its arsenal of rifles obsolete, yet Chernyshev, war minister since 1827, now prince and president of the State Council, reported that the army ‘needed no changes whatsoever’. His ministers were decrepit – Nesselrode had been foreign minister since 1814. His brother Michael dropped dead; Mouffy was ill; Nicholas himself suffered gout. ‘The theatre is our only pastime,’ he told Annette. ‘We’re leading a very peaceful life.’20

  Nicholas tightened censorship which, soon under twelve different committees, became suffocating: the word ‘republic’ was removed from Greek and Roman history books while Shakespeare’s Richard III was banned. Alexei Orlov, who had succeeded Benckendorff as head of the secret police, started to monitor an eccentric civil servant, Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky, whose circle discussed socialism and atheism. Nicholas ordered its immediate dissolution. At 4 a.m. on 23 April 1849, the twenty-seven-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky, a doctor’s son and trained engin
eer who had won praise for his first novel Poor Folk, awoke to find two Gendarmes in his bedroom. Taken to 16 Fontanka, Dostoevsky and fifty others were inspected by Orlov, then despatched to the Peter and Paul Fortress where they were interrogated for months until Nicholas had Dostoevsky, Petrashevsky and fourteen others condemned to death by firing squad.

  On 22 December 1849, Alexander, as commander of the Guards, supervised the spectacle as Dostoevsky and his comrades were led out to the scaffold in Semyonovsky Square where ‘the sentence of death was read to us, we all were made to kiss the cross, a sword was broken over our heads and we were told to don our white execution shirts’. The first three were tied to stakes as the firing squad raised their rifles. ‘Aim!’ cried the commanding officer.

  ‘For me,’ wrote Dostoevsky, ‘only one minute of life remained . . . Then the drums sounded “retreat” . . . and an order from His Imperial Majesty granted us our lives.’ Nicholas had himself devised this sadistic trick, which drove at least one of the youths to madness. ‘There was no joy at returning to living,’ wrote Dostoevsky. ‘People around me were shouting, but I didn’t care. I had already lived through the worst.’ Dostoevsky departed for four years of hard labour in Siberia. Nicholas had overreacted and the crisis that would lead to the humbling of Nicholas started not in Petersburg but in Jerusalem.21

  On Good Friday, 26 March 1846, forty monks were killed in a battle between Orthodox and Catholics in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem which had been ruled by the Ottomans since 1517. The Sepulchre had long been run by the Orthodox and indeed Jerusalem was dominated by the Russians, who regarded the pilgrimage there as an essential preparation for death. Nicholas himself planned to go that year, though his own pilgrimage had been cancelled due to the revolutions. Now the Catholics threatened Orthodox rights guaranteed in Catherine the Great’s treaties.