The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  This was the first of Alexander’s reforms. In 1864, he gave Russia an independent judiciary with jury trial as well as a new local body – an assembly at both the provincial and district levels called the zemstvo, which would be partly elected and would contain peasants as well as nobles and merchants. The repression of Jews was eased: the Pale was relaxed so that top merchants and artisans could now live in Petersburg and Moscow, where Jewish financiers such as Baron Joseph Ginzburg (whose barony was granted by the duke of Hesse-Darmstadt but recognized by the tsar) started to canvass for the repeal of Nicholas I’s harsh military draft.

  Yet there were limits: when the Moscow Assembly proposed a constitution, he dissolved it. His aim, like the perestroika unleashed by Mikhail Gorbachev to reinvigorate Communism, was not to destroy autocracy but to fortify it. Soon after the liberation, Bismarck asked if he would grant a constitution. ‘The common people see the monarch as a paternal all-powerful lord, emissary of God,’ replied Alexander. ‘This has the force of religious sentiment . . . inseparable from personal dependence on me. If the people lost this feeling, for the power my crown imparts to me, the nimbus that the nation possesses would be ruptured . . . I’d reduce the authority of the government without compensation if I included in it representatives from nobility or nation.’ Alexander was a reforming autocrat, but an autocrat nonetheless.

  ‘The tsar showed such unshakeable firmness in the great undertaking that he could ignore the murmuring of opponents of innovation,’ wrote General Dmitri Miliutin, the brother of the liberator of the serfs. ‘In this sense, the soft, humane Alexander II displayed greater decisiveness and a truer idea of his own power than his father [who was] noted for his iron will.’* Yet the abolition of serfdom broke asunder the pact between ruler and nobility that had made Russia, leaving the tsar to base his power on the rifles of his army and the carapace of his unloved bureaucracy. Unmoored by this anchor, the Romanovs and society started to drift apart.

  Weary from these efforts, the tsar probably hoped now to enjoy his pleasures – hunting, family holidays in Germany, and his mistresses.8

  *

  On 22 November 1861, Kostia was riding into Tsarskoe Selo when he encountered the emperor ‘on horseback and behind him Alexandra Dolgorukaya, also on horseback and completely alone. The conclusion’, Kostia confided to his diary, ‘is not difficult.’

  Princess Alexandra Dolgorukaya, one of Empress Marie’s maids-of-honour, known as ‘the Tigress’, was the first mistress of the reign. It was ‘painful’, thought Kostia, not for moral reasons (he himself had mistresses), but because Alexandra had a reputation as a vamp.

  ‘At first glance, this tall girl, long limbed, flat chest, bony shoulders, zinc-white face’, did not seem at all attractive, observed Tyutcheva, sharing a room with her in the palace. Yet as soon as she sensed ‘an interesting man’s gaze, she acquired the magnificent pure feline grace of a young tigress, face flushed, eyes and smile sly and tender, suffused with a mysterious charm which subjugated not only men but women . . . There was something predatory, not like a cat with its little deceits but the tigress, proud and regal in its depravity.’

  The Tigress made sure everyone knew it: on 20 November 1855, while the empress was earnestly reading The Dictionary of History and Geography, a choice that catches the tedium of Marie, surrounded by her girls, including Alexandra Dolgorukaya, the emperor came in. Suddenly the Tigress fell in a faint. Too quickly, the emperor rushed to check her pulse. ‘The empress continued to flick through the magazine with complete peace of mind that noted the over-eager interest shown by the Sovereign.’ Such are the delicate games of love at the court of autocrats. The Tigress was not Alexander’s only mistress. Later when he surveyed a Winter Palace ball, he remarked that ‘Several of my former pupilles are here.’ Bismarck, who was so close he was almost adopted into the family, enjoyed Alexander’s glamorous court – ‘dinners with His Majesty, evening theatre, good ballet, boxes full of pretty women’ – but he noticed too that he is ‘constantly in love’. ‘Every new passion is written on his face,’ observed lady-in-waiting Alexandra Tolstoya.

  Yet the emperor and empress remained good friends. Marie had been pregnant seven times and, a few years earlier, they had been bound together by the loss of a daughter Alexandra, known as Lina, who was six when she died from meningitis. They had even tried to contact Lina with the help of a table-turning, internationally famous spiritualist.* Just before the liberation of the serfs, Marie had given birth to a sixth son, Paul. At the age of thirty-seven, Empress Marie was prematurely aged, a pale, pinched, feverish Victorian saint in a headscarf with a hacking cough. ‘She was so thin and fragile,’ wrote Tyutcheva, ‘but she was unusually elegant’ with ‘a deeply religious soul which like its physical shell seemed to come straight out of the frame of a medieval painting’. She was so inhibited that when the tsar’s doctor, Sergei Botkin, arrived to examine her, she refused to undress, explaining, ‘I’m a very private person.’ Botkin replied, ‘But, Your Majesty, I can’t examine you through your robes.’ Botkin diagnosed TB and prescribed a warm climate, which encouraged Alexander to buy the Livadia estate in Crimea.* Yet she had a sense of humour. Alexander always told her she looked wonderful until one day she replied: ‘The only thing I’m wonderful for is the anatomical theatre – a teaching skeleton, covered with a thick layer of rouge and powder.’

  After breakfast each day, Alexander would return to his study on the second floor of the Winter Palace and receive his ministers.† He adored his family, particularly his heir, Nixa. No emperor could wish for a more perfect caesarevich than Nixa. The future, at least, was assured.9

  Alexander had warned the Poles against any resistance on his accession – ‘gentlemen, let us have no dreams’ – but encouraged by the age of reform and nationalism, and infuriated by Russian domination, the Poles and Lithuanians decided dreams were not enough. Poland seethed with discontent. ‘We must expect attempts at revolution’ in Poland, Alexander informed Bariatinsky, ‘though thanks to energetic measures, I hope they’ll be nipped in the bud.’ But instead of being nipped, they blossomed. His governor-general in Warsaw, the semi-senile General Gorchakov, responded with ‘lamentable weakness’.

  Alexander tried concessions and offered the viceroyship to Kostia. The day after he arrived in Warsaw, Kostia appeared in the royal box at the theatre where he was shot at and wounded by a tailor’s apprentice, who was hanged afterwards. Kostia did not lose his nerve and followed his policy of reconciliation. But in January 1863, when he tried to remove radical youth by conscripting them into the army, the Poles rose in a full-scale rebellion, fielding 30,000 irregulars, nobles, peasants, even Jews (including a Jewish general) who fought 300,000 Russian troops in over a thousand skirmishes.

  The revolt soured Alexander’s perestroika. The Retrogrades thought too much freedom had been granted, the liberals too little. Alexander understood that ‘The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform,’ as Alexis de Tocqueville had recently put it. Alexander’s relaxation of controls over universities and censorship of the press had created a heady expectation that led to student riots which had to be suppressed. ‘Here everything’s quiet, thank God,’ the tsar informed Bariatinsky, ‘but a severe vigilance is more necessary than ever, given the thoughtless tendencies of so-called progress.’

  The 1860s were an exciting but disturbing time. Newspapers mushroomed. ‘I’ve never been greatly enamoured of writers in general,’ Alexander confided to Bariatinsky, ‘and I’ve sadly concluded that they are a class of individuals with hidden motives and dangerous biases.’ But if Kostia’s generation were satisfied with the reforms, their sons, the children of the 1860s, were quickly frustrated and disillusioned, like the character Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, published in 1862. These Nihilists – Turgenev coined the neologism – impatiently cast aside tsarist reform to embrace atheism, modernity and revolution.

  Pulling back fast, the tsar dismissed liberals
like Nikolai Miliutin, who had become the bogeyman of the nobility, and promoted generals to chastise the students. Many were arrested. On 16 May 1862, fires started to break out in Petersburg. ‘The red rooster took on such scope,’ wrote the new war minister General Dmitri Miliutin, ‘there could be no doubt it was arson.’ On the 28th, Alexander rushed back from Tsarskoe Selo to fight the fires. The arsonists were never caught, but Alexander ordered the secret police to close journals and arrest radicals.* Even now he toyed with taking a step towards wider representation by converting the State Council into a partly elected advisory institution, but the riots and Polish revolution delayed his reforms.

  Alexander ordered the governor-general of Vilna, General Mikhail Muraviev, who had the face of a bulldog and a figure squat as a cannon, to crush the Poles. Muraviev demanded the recall of Kostia. He liked to boast that ‘The only good Pole is a hanged Pole.’ He hanged hundreds of Poles, but thousands were shot and 18,000 were deported to Siberia.

  ‘The Hangman’ disgusted the tsar, who raised him to count but retired him. Prussia backed Alexander, but the rest of Europe, particularly the French, were appalled (though Muraviev’s conduct was a good deal less savage than the British repression of the Indian Mutiny, as Russia pointed out when Britain protested at its treatment of the Poles). Meanwhile, within the family, Alexander and Marie celebrated the engagement of their son Nixa.10

  Nixa, now nineteen years old, was the shared joy of his parents. He was more refined than his burly brothers. Slight with wavy brown hair, he was aesthetic and intelligent, and he liked drawing, but he was bold too: as a boy, he had told his awesome grandfather Nicholas that he did not wish to study French.

  ‘And how will you converse with ambassadors, Your Highness?’ asked his father.

  ‘I’ll have an interpreter,’ answered the boy.

  ‘Bravo,’ said his father. ‘All Europe will laugh at you!’

  ‘Then I’ll declare war on Europe!’ cried the boy, to his grandfather’s amusement. When his father succeeded to the throne, Nixa sincerely told Tyutcheva: ‘Papa is now so busy, he’s ill with fatigue – and I’m still too young to help him.’

  ‘It’s not that you’re too young,’ answered his brother Sasha. ‘You’re too stupid.’

  ‘It’s not true I’m stupid,’ answered the caesarevich. ‘Just too small.’

  ‘Too stupid,’ chanted Sasha and his brothers – at which Nixa threw a pillow at them.

  As he grew up, Alexander was keen to ensure that Nixa was masculine enough to wear the crown, encouraging him to engage in military pursuits. Nixa was the best educated of heirs – ‘the crown of perfection’, Kostia called him. ‘If I succeeded in forming a student equal to Nikolai Alexandrovich once in ten years, I’d think I’d have fulfilled my duties,’ said his history teacher. Alexander chose as his legal tutor one of the creators of his law reforms, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who accompanied his charge on a tour of Russia. ‘Darling Maman,’ wrote the boy from his travels, ‘1000 thanks for your most charming letter. In reading I felt I was next to you. I could hear you talking. Here at Libau the heart rejoices to find how attached they are to our family and the principle it represents. I’m doing well in my studies. Not a minute wasted . . . Bye bye, Maman.’

  Years earlier, he had seen a photograph of a gamine Danish princess. ‘You know, dear Mama,’ he wrote to Marie on 3 August 1863, ‘I haven’t fallen in love with anyone for a long time. . . You may laugh but the main reason for this is Dagmar whom I fell in love with long ago without even seeing her. I think only about her.’ Dagmar, always known as ‘Minny’, was the daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark. Her sister Alexandra had just married Bertie, the prince of Wales. In mid-1864, Alexander sent Nixa off on a European tour through Italy, Germany and, most importantly, Denmark. But Denmark was at war.11

  The tsar’s uncle, King Wilhelm of Prussia, had appointed the exambassador to Petersburg, Bismarck, as minister-president, to defeat the liberals and defend the monarchy. Bismarck, colossal in stature and walrus-moustached, looked like a diehard Junker – a conservative squire from Brandenburg and the hard-drinking veteran of duels. But he turned out to be a brilliantly ruthless and modern practitioner of the new Realpolitik in the ever more intensely fought tournament between the great powers, which he explained thus: ‘the only sound basis for a large state is egoism not romanticism.’ Highly strung, grotesquely malicious and hypochondriacal, thin-skinned yet tough as a rhinoceros, this instinctive risk-taker, ingenious improviser and cunning conspirator saw a solution to Prussia’s domestic problems in an aggressive foreign policy that would use the kingdom’s superb army to unite Germany, challenge the France of Napoleon III and harness nationalism in the service of the monarchy. As envoy to Alexander II, he had realised all this was possible because of Russian hatred of Austria after the defeat of the Crimean War.* As his first step, Bismarck instigated war against Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein, that question so complex that ‘Only three people’, joked Palmerston, ‘have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business – the Prince Consort, who is dead – a German professor, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten all about it.’ But Bismarck had not. In the summer of 1864, Prussia, in alliance with Austria, defeated Denmark – days before Nixa arrived in Copenhagen.12

  ‘If only you knew how happy I was: I’ve fallen in love with Dagmar,’ the caesarevich told his mother. ‘How can I not be happy when my heart tells me I love her, love her dearly?. . . How can I describe her? Pretty, direct, intelligent, lively yet shy.’

  Afterwards Nixa met his parents in Darmstadt, then he hurried back to Copenhagen. On family promenades, ‘the two of us lagged behind,’ he reported to his mother. ‘I wanted the earth to swallow me up. I was building up to say I love you but she understood clearly: a heartfelt YES was finally said and we kissed.’ Nixa continued with his tour down to Italy, but there was something amiss.

  He found riding painful. By the time he reached Florence he was in agony. The doctors discovered a swelling on his spine, but prescribed rest, sunshine and various treatments that kept him in bed for six weeks. He did not get better. He and Minny wrote each other love letters daily. In late December, he sailed in a Russian warship to join his mother in Nice. The love letters slowed until Minny asked if he had fallen in love with a black-eyed Italian. Nixa admitted he loved her so much that he could not control his emotions. Lying helpless in the seaside Villa Diesbach, he deteriorated until, in April 1865, an Austrian doctor diagnosed cerebrospinal meningitis. Over-sensitive to the sound of the waves, he was moved inland to the Villa Bermond,* where he suffered a stroke that paralysed him on one side.

  The tsar was informed. Minny was telegraphed: ‘Nicholas has received the Last Rites. Pray for us and come if you can.’

  Nixa asked Marie, ‘Poor ma, what will you do without your Nicky?’ Joined by his brother Sasha who worshipped him, he held out his arms: ‘Sasha, Sasha, what are you doing here! Come quickly and kiss me!’

  The emperor, accompanied by his sons Vladimir and Alexis, dashed across Europe – ‘with one thought, would God allow us to find him alive?’ In Berlin, Wilhelm embraced him at the station and a Danish carriage, bearing Princess Minny and her mother, was attached to the train; in Paris, Napoleon III hugged Alexander on his way to Nice, where on 10 April he was met at the station by sobbing courtiers.

  At the bedside, Alexander threw himself on his knees, kissing the boy’s hand. Then Nixa turned to Minny. Her mother recalled, ‘His look – as the tsar led her by the hand up to his bed – it was of the purest happiness.’ Nixa smiled at her: ‘Isn’t she wonderfully sweet, Father?’

  Minny thanked God ‘that I reached him in time, my darling treasure. I will never forget the look he gave me when I approached him. No never!’ she wrote to her father. Soon afterwards he became delirious, chattering about oppressed Slavs. Even his delirium was intelligent. Minny and the others frequently fled the room, unable to control themselves. ‘The poor emperor and empress!�
� wrote Minny. ‘They were so attentive to me in my and their sorrow.’ She stayed by the bed, ‘kneeling by him day and night’. Nixa now longed for death. At dawn on 12 April, his governor ran across the street to the Villa Verdie to awaken the family. The boy was vomiting up his medication. As his parents and brothers surrounded him, Minny knelt beside him and wiped the vomit from his chin. ‘He recognized me in his final minute,’ she remembered. Nixa held Minny’s hand, but then looked at Sasha: ‘Papa, take care of Sasha, he is such an honest, good man.’ He ‘raised his right hand and took Sasha’s head’, recorded his governor, ‘and seemed to be reaching for Princess Dagmar’s head with his left’ – a moment that would swiftly become significant. ‘His tongue weakened, he said his last words. Taking the empress by the hand he nodded at the doctor and said, ‘Take good care of her!’ Then Minny kissed him and he died.

  Even as the body began its journey back to Petersburg, Minny noticed the suffering of the eldest surviving brother – ‘Sasha who loved him so nobly – not only as a brother but as his only and best friend. It’s very difficult for him, poor thing, because he must now take his beloved brother’s place.’