The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  * It was divided into five sections that had expanded to six by the 1840s. The First prepared his own decrees. The Second under Speransky codified the laws. The Third would be the secret police. The Fourth ran family charities, the Fifth the state serfs and the Sixth the Caucasus.

  * He appointed the first Court Minister to run the court with its thousands of courtiers and servants, the Romanov family, estates and palaces, as well as the chivalric orders. For the rest of the dynasty, this was one of the positions closest to the throne: he chose Alexander I’s inseparable companion Prince Peter Volkonsky for the job.

  † In 1811 he had been seconded to the Paris embassy where he seduced a French actress whom he shared for a while with Napoleon himself. Leaving the embassy under a cloud he smuggled the actress back into Russia before scandal forced him to send her home. Only his heroic war record redeemed him.

  * Alexander I had exiled Pushkin, working for the Foreign Ministry, to New Russia where he caused lascivious scandal wherever he went. Seconded to the court of Count Michael Vorontsov, governor-general, Pushkin had an affair with Vorontsov’s wife, Elise, daughter of Potemkin’s niece Sashenka. He probably wrote The Talisman in her honour – and he boasted that he was the father of the Vorontsovs’ daughter Sophia, breaking the code of discretion. Vorontsov sent him to inspect a plague of locusts. Pushkin avenged himself with this verse on Vorontsov: ‘Half an English lord, half a merchant / Half a sage, half an ignoramus / Half a scoundrel, but there’s hope / That he’ll be whole in the end.’

  * General Alexei Yermolov, proudly descended from Genghiz Khan, was a hero of 1812. Pushkin described him as having ‘the head of a tiger on the torso of Hercules’. Appointed by Alexander I in 1816, Yermolov’s brutal repression of the defiant Chechen and Daghestan tribes sparked a full-scale jihadist insurgency. When Alexander challenged his methods, he boasted, ‘I desire that the terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses.’ But Benckendorff hated him, informing Nicholas that he had ruled the Caucasus ‘for ten years like a Turkish pasha’ – he kept a harem of three Muslim concubines. More seriously, they suspected him of Decembrism. Mentioned as a sympathizer in some interrogations, he had been slow to take the oath to Nicholas. Sending General Dibich down to dismiss the popular Yermolov without provoking ‘any fuss or trouble’, Nicholas told him to investigate ‘the evil intentions of Yermolov, past and present; who’s behind the evil in that nest of intrigues?’ Yermolov was quietly and shabbily sacked.

  * Nicholas demanded the storming of Varna, but there his commander, his friend Prince Alexander Menshikov, almost paid for his failure with his life: as he dismounted his horse, a cannonball flew between his legs, castrating him. Nicholas arrived at Varna himself and summoned the more competent Michael Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia, who won its surrender.

  * Just after his return in October 1828, his mother, Maria Fyodorovna, died. ‘Nicholas loved her, adored her,’ Mouffy wrote to Annette. ‘He’s completely undone.’ Nicholas recounted Maria’s death to his brother: ‘It’s all over, my Michael, and we are orphans . . . She smiled one more time, hugging Lily, Adine, Kitty [Nicholas’s daughters]. I can hardly write, no more strength!’

  * The poet-playwright Griboyedov was appointed Russian minister in Teheran, where he was hated for enforcing the peace treaty. He was lynched and torn to pieces: only a scar on his hand allowed the dismembered, headless carcass to be identified. Pushkin, travelling in the Caucasus, famously claimed to have seen his coffin on a cart returning to Tiflis. The dates do not match, so it is most probable that Pushkin invented this story. Griboyedov was buried in Tiflis, where his grave can still be seen. His young widow had it engraved: ‘Your spirit and works remain eternally in the memory of Russians. Why did my love for you outlive you?’

  * Nicholas loved to relax with his wife at ‘our paradise’ at Peterhof. ‘At the Cottage, I am really happy,’ wrote Mouffy, to escape the ‘massive gilt’ of the big palaces. Mouffy’s estate Alexandria at Peterhof was given to her by Alexander. Nicholas celebrated his Ottoman victory by building their Gothic ‘Cottage’, in fact a chunky mansion, with ‘For faith, tsar and fatherland’ engraved over the door. Jokingly dubbing himself ‘Lord of the Cottage’, he regarded this as ‘our favourite corner on earth’. There they lived in ‘informal’ bourgeois wholesomeness, later adding other ugly, mock-Gothic houses there for the children. (Under the last tsars, these expanded dachas became favourite summer residences.) Even there, Nicholas’s family were meant to display their Romanov morality. The court and diplomatic corps were invited to watch the family taking tea.

  * From Peter the Great to Catherine the Great, the black guards had been slaves from the markets of Constantinople. In 1810, the black valet of the US ambassador was recruited by the court. When the news spread, American slaves started to ‘defect’ from American ships to enrol as ‘Nubians’. Darker skins were sought to highlight the costumes. They were allowed to bring their families and visit America during the holidays. Under Nicholas, the best known was Alexander Gabriel, a US Navy cook who had deserted in a Russian port. But in 1851 Nicholas economized by cutting the number of Nubians from twenty to eight.

  * The novelist Lev Tolstoy later described the emperor’s seductions, probably based on the stories of his cousin Countess Alexandra Tolstoya, a lady-in-waiting. Nicholas meets a young girl at a masquerade at the theatre, noting ‘her whiteness, her beautiful figure, her tender voice’, and leads her to a private box: ‘she proved to be a pretty twenty-year-old virgin, daughter of a Swedish governess’ who tells Nicholas ‘how when quite a child, she had fallen in love with him from his portraits and made up her mind to attract his attention . . . Now she had succeeded and wanted nothing more – so she said. The girl was taken to the place where Nicholas usually had rendezvous with women and there he spent more than an hour with her . . .’ This appears in the novella Hadji Murat, one of Tolstoy’s last works. Even though it was written long afterwards in the reign of Nicholas II, there was no question of publishing it under the Romanovs. As for Mouffy, during the balls she enjoyed the innocent attentions of her own cavaliere servente, her favourite Chevalier-Garde, Prince Alexander Trubetskoi. But no one doubted her virtue.

  * The tsar himself intervened in these games of literary malice on Pushkin’s behalf. ‘My dear friend,’ Nicholas wrote to Benckendorff. ‘I forgot to tell you that in today’s Bee [literary journal] there’s a most unjust vulgar article directed against Pushkin,’ and he suggested that Benckendorff summon the critic ‘and forbid him to publish any criticism whatever’. Every writer suffering bad reviews might wish for such a protector, but the critic in question was not only Uvarov’s creature but Benckendorff’s informer and Nicholas did not insist. Pushkin’s experience typified the stifling control by the Third Section over intellectual life. The intellectuals reacted in different ways. In 1836, Peter Chadaev published his Letters on the Philosophy of History attacking Russia for living ‘entirely within the narrowest confines of the present without a past or future, amid dead calm’, which he blamed on the backwardness of Orthodoxy. Nicholas had Chadaev declared insane.

  * The sender has never been identified but the ambassador was an unlikely culprit for there was no upside for him in a public scandal. Probabably the sender was a malicious prankster, the crippled civil servant and social gadfly Prince Peter Dolgoruky, aged twenty, who had a proven taste for sending anonymous letters.

  * Nicholas had d’Anthes court-martialled and escorted to the border. ‘Heeckeren’, the tsar wrote to his brother Michael, ‘behaved like a vile blackguard. He pimped for d’Anthes in Pushkin’s absence.’ Heeckeren was recalled, but later became Dutch ambassador in Vienna. D’Anthes, who had three daughters with Ekaterina, thrived in France and lived until 1895. Nicholas kept his word to Pushkin, awarding a generous settlement to Natalya and the children. When she returned to Petersburg, the empress made her a maid-of-honour, while Nicholas’s courtier Baron Korf noted that she ‘
belongs to that group of privileged young women whom the emperor occasionally favours with his visits’. Giving her 25,000 roubles, he sponsored her second marriage to a general. This looks like the aftermath of an affair, but there is no evidence that one took place. Natalya died in 1863.

  * Back in Petersburg, there was light of a different and destructive sort. On 17 December 1837, Nicholas was at the theatre when Volkonsky, court minister, informed him that the Winter Palace was on fire, burning ‘like a volcano in the midst of Petersburg’. Thirty Guardsmen were killed. Nicholas directed the fire-fighting, despatching Alexander to extinguish another fire at the docks. Most of the Hermitage’s treasures were saved, heaped up in the snow. It was now that Nicholas touchingly ordered the saving of his love letters from Mouffy before anything else. The empress, aided by her ladies-in-waiting, packed her things until the heat was unbearable and he ordered her out. The family moved to the Anichkov. The palace burned for three days as crowds watched in dead silence. Nicholas ordered it rebuilt in a year, a seemingly impossible schedule, but the task was achieved by his harshest henchman Kleinmikhel and 6,000 workers at a terrible cost in lives. Nicholas’s truly sumptuous Winter Palace, today’s Hermitage Museum, was built to impress. With its 1,050 rooms and 177 staircases, it is so vast that it was said a peasant servant brought not only his entire family but a cow to provide milk for his children, and no one noticed until the stench of cow dung became unbearable.

  * Vorontsov, nicknamed ‘Milord’, was brought up in London, where his father Simon was ambassador, and at Wilton, the seat of his sister who married the earl of Pembroke. A hero of the Napoleonic wars, he had commanded the Russian occupation forces in France then helped make Odessa a thriving cosmopolitan city attracting Jewish and Italian settlers. With his Polish wife, Italian valet, French cook, Hungarian mistress and English groom, Vorontsov was a European who favoured Anglophile liberalism and modern technology. His coolness was no myth. When he caught his mistress, Irma Csesenyi, young Hungarian wife of his vintner, in flagrante with an adjutant, Vorontsov did not turn a hair. ‘Cornet,’ he said, ‘you are not in your uniform’ – and went on to the verandah to smoke a cigar. His wife Elise was a daughter of Potemkin’s niece Sashenka Branitska. She was raised in the Winter Palace, dandled by Catherine the Great. ‘One of the most attractive women of her time,’ observed a visitor. ‘I’ve never seen anything comparable to the smile on her lips which seemed to demand a kiss.’ In Crimea, the Vorontsovs built the Alupka Palace, in a style combining Scottish baronial with Moorish fantasia, that first made the Crimean Riviera fashionable. During the Yalta Conference of 1945, Churchill and the British delegation stayed at Alupka.

  * Nicholas’s image was damaged by a gossipy bestseller, Russia in 1839, by the camp French travel-writer the marquis de Custine. Benckendorff, spin-doctor as well as a secret policeman, suggested that Nicholas give Custine an interview, but the marquis sketched Nicholas as the brutish, megalomaniacal and adulterous tyrant of a barbarically aggressive empire that ‘is itself a prison, whose vast size only makes it more formidable’.

  * Montefiore had become famous for his intervention during the 1840 Damascus ‘blood-libel’ case when innocent Jews including many children were tortured. Montefiore rushed to Alexandria where he won their release from Mehmet Ali and on to Constantinople where he persuaded Sultan Abdul Mecid to ban the libel throughout Ottoman lands. The ‘blood libel’, starting in 1144 in Norwich, England, then spreading across Europe and the Middle East, framed innocent Jews who were accused of murdering Christians, often children, in order to bake Passover cakes with their blood. It was widely believed by anti-semites including Nicholas. Faced with a case, he knew it might be an ‘outrageous lie’ but sensed that ‘the crime was committed by Jews. Numerous examples prove that there are fiends or sectarians among the Jews who consider Christian blood necessary for their rites.’ As we will see, he was not the last Romanov to believe in this.

  † First in 1839, he allowed Maria to marry into the wider Bonaparte family when she fell in love with Max de Beauharnais, duke of Leuchtenberg, who was descended from Empress Josephine – provided that her husband moved to Petersburg. The couple agreed; the Leuchtenbergs were often visited by Nicholas.

  * This was Baroness Amalia Krüdener: Nicholas gave Krüdener the gift of an estate, but she was too brazen, noted the tsar’s daughter, Olga: the empress ‘saw through her disguise’. Amalia turned her attention to Benckendorff, who fell so in love with her that she ‘used him coldly, managing his person, money, relationships’. When it seemed that Amalia was converting Benckendorff to Catholicism, Nicholas decided to remove her and appointed her husband as Swedish ambassador – but she was pregnant. The son was adopted by Count Nikolai Adlerberg, son of the tsar’s best friend, now governor-general of Finland, who was also in love with her. He gave his name to her son – providing she married him after the death of her husband, which she did, holding court in Helsingfors for many years.

  † Kostia escorted her to Württemberg: while in Germany, he fell in love with Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Altenburg, known as ‘Sanny’, writing to her: ‘Just one thought moves me, just one image fills my eyes: forever and only she, my angel, my universe.’

  * His version of Russian supremacy was expressed in the Kremlin where he commissioned his architect Konstantin Thon to create his Great Kremlin Palace, which incorporated the nine old Muscovite chapels and Terem Palace while adding new apartments and five immense reception halls, all in his favourite Russian-Byzantine Revival style. Nicholas’s gigantist monolithic vision has perfectly suited the greater Russian nationalism of modern leaders. Stalin held his banquet to celebrate victory in 1945 in the white Georgievsky Hall. Putin has renovated the throne room, the Andreevsky, with Byzantine gilded magnificence.

  † His scepticism about railways (particularly their military potential) allowed Russia to fall behind the West, its first line opening from Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo in 1837. Only in 1851 did a second passenger line open, between Moscow and Petersburg.

  * Bizarrely the envoy sent by Napoleon to inform Nicholas, then visiting Berlin, of his coup was none other than d’Anthes, the Guards officer who had killed Pushkin. Napoleon III raised him to senator.

  † His manifesto in 1849 had declared: ‘We all shall as one cry out: God is with us! Take heed O nations and submit for God is with us!’ But he was just as preposterous in private: when a committee gave a dinner to thank Vorontsov for his service, Nicholas commented: ‘Absolutely improper. Only I can thank someone; no one else.’

  * The viceroy of the Caucasus, the Anglophile Vorontsov (whose nephew Sidney Herbert was British war secretary), disapproved of the war but was semi-retired. In July 1854, Shamyl, who had long brooded on the surrender of his son Jemal-Eddin, now a Russian officer in Warsaw, attacked Georgia. A younger son, Gazi Muhammed, raided a country house and captured two young Georgian sisters, Princess Anna Chavchavadze and Princess Varvara Orbeliani, granddaughters of the last king, Giorgi XII, ladies-in-waiting to the empress. They were spirited away into the mountains. In desperate negotiations for over a year, Shamyl demanded the return of Jemal-Eddin.

  * Dr Nikolai Pirogov was the first to use anaesthetic on a battlefield and devised the modern five-state system of triage field surgery, later adopted by all the combatants of the First World War. His patroness was Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, sister-in-law of the emperor, widow of Grand Duke Michael, whom the tsar nicknamed ‘the Family Intellectual’. She bought quinine in England and imported it, and she persuaded the tsar to back Pirogov, triage and female nursing, creating her own order of nurses.

  † The Georgian princesses had been Shamyl’s prisoners for over a year. Now Nicholas agreed to swap them for Prince Jemal-Eddin, who was summoned from Warsaw. ‘Sire,’ said the prince, ‘I will go back at once.’ Jemal was duly swapped for the princesses.

  * Nicholas left Nelidova 200,000 roubles which she gave to charity. She left the palace until Mouffy insisted she return – and s
tay. She often prayed piously in the Palace Church and sometimes she read to the widowed empress. She lived until 1897.

  SCENE 2

  Liberator

  CAST

  ALEXANDER II, emperor 1855–81, son of Nicholas I and Alexandra Fyodorovna

  Maria Alexandrovna (née Princess Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt), empress, ‘Marie’

  Alexandra, their eldest daughter, ‘Lina’

  Nikolai, caesarevich, their eldest son, ‘Nixa’

  ALEXANDER III, emperor 1881–94, caesarevich, their second son, ‘Sasha’

  Maria Fyodorovna (née Princess Dagmar of Denmark), Sasha’s wife, ‘Minny’

  NICHOLAS II, emperor 1894–1917, their son, ‘Nicky’

  Vladimir, third son of Alexander II and Marie

  Alexis, their fourth son

  Maria, their second daughter, married Prince Alfred, duke of Edinburgh

  Sergei, their fifth son

  Paul, their sixth son

  Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, Alexander II’s mistress and second wife, later Princess Yurievskaya, ‘Katya’, ‘Odalisque’

  Prince Georgi Yurievsky, their son, ‘Gogo’

  Princess Olga Yurievskaya, their eldest daughter

  Princess Catherine Yurievskaya, their youngest daughter

  Konstantin, brother of Alexander II, general-admiral, ‘Kostia’, married Alexandra (née Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Altenburg), ‘Sanny’